


Burnt Flesh

by Guede



Series: Intemperance [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alive Laura Hale, Alternate Universe - Gangsters, Alternate Universe - Prohibition Era, Amorality, BAMF Stiles, Bloodplay, Dom/sub Undertones, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/M, Gallows Humor, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Incest, Kidnapping, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Pack Dynamics, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rough Sex, Werewolf Senses, Werewolf Turning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-05
Updated: 2015-11-05
Packaged: 2018-04-30 02:43:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 33,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5147351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to <i>Straw Dogs</i>.  In the aftermath of Scott’s death, Chris and the Hales head to Chicago.  They aren’t a proper pack, they don't have a proper alpha, and they get a less than warm welcome from Stiles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, while this is Prohibition era, I'm not working particularly hard at rooting out the anachronisms, so consider it more like movie Prohibition than real Prohibition.
> 
> I dropped the film noir tag since this part really is less about crime itself and more about its aftereffects (if _Straw Dogs_ was subtitled "Film noir as told from the femme fatale's pov" in my head, then this is "how Chris Argent got, and didn't get, his groove back").

_“It is human nature to hate those whom we have injured.”_  
\--Tacitus, from _Agricola_

 _“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pinprick, but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.”_  
\--F. Scott Fitzgerald, from _Tender is the Night_

* * *

“You want a drink?” are the first words that Stiles says to the Hales in three months.

Chris comes in last, and has to shoulder aside Derek to get a sight of Stiles. The office is small, and already filled with boxes and piles of ledgers; Laura makes a little room by perching on a stack of books, while Peter eases clear of the chest under Stiles’ feet to crowd himself into the narrow space between the door and a bookcase. They leave just enough room for Chris and Derek, once the door is shut, and for Stiles to stretch till his spine cracks, then flop even lower in his chair.

“No, thank you,” Peter and Laura both say, in identical low, precise, polite tones.

Stiles shrugs, then lets his hands flap over the chair arms. He’s unmistakably a werewolf now, from the tilt of his head to the loose predator way he holds himself, and so much so that the remnants of the man Chris used to be wonders that he’d missed it. “Well, you made it all the way to the big city,” he says. “How was the trip?”

Derek’s shoulders bridle and Laura shoots him a fierce, quelling look, which he turns from, staring instead at the wall just past Stiles’ shoulder.

“Tolerable,” Peter finally says, when it seems like neither of the other two will. He pauses, then sets his hat aside and gives his hands a quick jerk, pulling his cuffs out of his suit-coat a fraction. “We’re here about what happened in Kansas.”

Stiles rolls his eyes, then lets his head drop back against the top of the seat in irritation. He heaves a deep, irritated sigh and abruptly drops his feet off the chest of Scott’s things to the floor. The slap of it makes Laura cry out; she hastily muffles it in her hand. Derek jerks back. Peter doesn’t, but he drops a few inches towards a crouch before catching himself.

And Chris can’t help but jerk his chin up. He’s been fighting the urge to drop to his knees since he walked in and he has to stab his claws into his palm to not do it now.

“Relax,” Stiles says, looking over at him. He gets out of the chair and then kicks it aside so he can dig through some of the ledgers. “And no, you’re not. One of you, maybe. All four of you, who the hell is watching the farm?”

“The crows and the buzzards, I imagine,” Peter says dryly. His eyes flick over as Laura and Derek both grimace, then return to Stiles. He’s got his hat in hand, and is pinching the brim so hard that it’s rolled back over his thumb. “Kansas _has_ made a mess of things. There are rogue omegas running all over the place, killing policemen and hijacking shipments. And the hunters are out in force.”

“So you came to ask for some heavy hitters?” Stiles locates the ledger he wants and flips it open. He pages rapidly through it, then snaps it shut, hard enough to make everyone flinch. “I got a couple boys I could send back with you, I suppose. If you promise they won’t end up like the last one I had in Beacon Hills.”

Derek makes a strangled, frustrated noise. He’s been rocking back and forth on his feet since they came in, and he lunges a half-second before Chris can close his fingers on Derek’s arm.

Chris’ claws shred Derek’s sleeve as the other man pulls away. Laura pushes off the books and goes for her brother, but gets slapped aside. By then Stiles already has his hand around Derek’s throat and is lifting him off the ground, eyes blazing red, fangs extended.

It’s absurd to see it, like a circus trick. Derek has height and shoulder breadth and weight on Stiles—a slight man, no matter how he carries himself—but he’s choking, veins in his hands bulging as he wrenches at Stiles’ wrist, and Stiles isn’t even breathing hard. It’s absurd, and at the same time it’s terrifying and every inch of Chris is cringing back, screaming at him to drop now, go belly up and pray for mercy.

Then Stiles drops Derek. He shakes off his hand, looking around the room. His brows rise slightly upon seeing neither Laura nor Peter rushing over, although Peter has his claws sunk into the bookcase next to him and Laura is just now shifting back to human.

“I—” Derek coughs, gets to his hands and knees, rubbing at his throat. He glances up at Stiles and stiffens. Then he takes a deep breath. He drops his head, crooks it sideways to show his throat. “Wasn’t attacking you.”

“Just mad at me, right,” Stiles says. He starts to turn, then frowns. Then he stoops back over and reaches for the back of Derek’s shirt-collar. 

Derek goes even more still, barely breathing. The muscle in the side of his throat flexes very slowly, like the slide of a drop of molasses, as Stiles pulls away the collar to show a cross-hatching of half-healed lacerations on his shoulder. His eyes track Stiles’ face as Stiles moves around, angling for a better look, and then close as Stiles continues to ignore him.

“Barbed wire?” Stiles says.

“Electrified, coated with wolfsbane,” Chris says. “Calaveras. They’re moving in now that there aren’t any Argents to claim the area, and we’re too worn down with killing omegas to deal with them. We had to leave.”

Peter looks less than pleased to be pre-empted, but before he can add his gloss to Chris’ words, Stiles sighs and flattens his hand over the back of Derek’s neck. Derek makes a thin, caught noise, his eyes and then his mouth flying open as Stiles tugs that hand up to the hairline. He bends into the grip, head rising and then twisting back, staring in confusion and longing, and Chris feels an itch on the back of his own neck that makes him want to rip Derek out of the way.

“And you came here. Right.” Stiles grins at Derek and as far gone as Derek is, he can still sense the coldness in that smile. When he flinches back, Stiles lets go, and then laughs at the disappointment on Derek’s face. “Well, can’t talk about that here. It’s going to take another hour for me to wrap up, but I can call a car and send you on to my place early.”

Then Stiles steps around Derek. He glances at Chris, eyes glinting like he’s going to laugh at Chris moving aside, too, but instead he just goes and opens the door. He stands in the doorway and issues a couple orders about how to divide up the crates, then looks back over his shoulder.

“We…we can wait till you’re done,” Laura says. She’s flustered and she’s looking to Peter, but for once he seems too stunned to intervene. Then she bobs her head down, turning back to Stiles. A lock of hair slips into her face and she pushes it back with an absentminded roughness. “It’s not that long, we can entertain ourselves.”

Stiles lets his gaze wander over the piles of ledgers, which are all that the office seems to hold, then shrugs. “Well, whatever your vice is. We’re not in the business of judging up here.”

He steps out. He only goes a few yards, and the door’s open so that negates any soundproofing wards, but Peter irritably flops back against the wall as if Stiles were miles away. “Chris,” he says, heavy with sarcasm.

“You were taking too long, or did you forget what annoyed him about you in the first place?” Chris mutters. He walks around Laura, who’s helping her brother to his feet, and takes the chair. “That didn’t go well.”

Derek presses his lips together because he disagrees. Chris doesn’t bother to explain why he’s wrong, and instead looks at Laura. She nods slightly, because she does agree, but then she wraps her arm around Derek and leans their heads together, whispering at him to be patient.

“All right,” Peter sighs. 

When Chris looks over, Peter is moving the chest of Scott’s things to the desk. He handles it as if it were made of glass, and dusts off the scuffs from Stiles’ shoes before stepping back. After a look around, he kicks a couple boxes over and then sits on one, and nudges the other between himself and Chris. He takes out a pack of cards from his coat and starts to deal three hands.

Laura resumes her perch on the ledgers, while Derek makes an exasperated noise and then reluctantly comes to pick up his hand. “I’m not playing for favors,” he mutters. “We all know what you’ll call them in for.”

“Perish the thought,” Peter says, with mock-lightness. “We’ll play for wolfsbane packets.”

“ _My_ wolfsbane?” Chris says. He picks up his hand anyway. “Is there anything you have respect for?”

Peter looks up at him with still, cold eyes. Outside, Stiles laughs with someone, a loose, amused sound that’s as far from his laughs at them as the North and South Poles are from each other. For a moment Peter taps his folded cards against the crate, looking at Chris. Then he glances down at them, with a little ironic shake of the head.

“You already know the answer to that, Chris,” he says, discarding two cards and dealing himself replacements. “It doesn’t become you to pretend otherwise.”

“It’s no good for you to gloss it all over, either,” Chris says. He hands over one card, then takes the fresh one Peter holds out to him.

“When I cleaned you up?” Peter holds the deck so that Derek can take the cards from the top, rather than have Peter deal them to him. “Hardly.”

“Don’t start with me,” Chris says. He scratches his bet into the top of the crate, since the wolfsbane’s back at the hotel, and then glances over as someone makes a racket outside. Stiles steps halfway into view, waving his arms and scolding his men, and Chris has to take a deep breath.

He regrets it almost immediately. The warehouse smells like a lot of things, booze and guns and straw and grease, a foul jumble that’s like taking a metal file to his nose, but even with that he has to do his damnedest to _not_ pick out Stiles’ scent. It’s been three months without it; they hadn’t dared touch Stiles’ things except to pack them up, and the hotel sheets hadn’t kept his scent for more than a week or two, barely slept-in as they were. Smelling it now, as easy as fresh air, makes him feel like he’s been slapped senseless.

Scott couldn’t have had very long either, Chris thinks suddenly. He wonders how that man had never seemed to show it, then grimaces. Looks back at the crate and the other two have marked out their bets.

“No, of course,” Peter says softly. He holds Chris’ gaze for a moment, something curled tight and dark in the back of his eyes, and then he smiles, shutters it over with charm. “But right now, you’re the start of the betting. Fold, call or raise, Chris?”

Chris doesn’t even look at his cards. “Raise,” he says, reaching over and scratching out a new bet.

* * *

Most people don’t remember the first few times they shift. It happens when they’re asleep, and the expansion of their senses is so steep and sudden that their minds can’t accept it as reality at first. Better to get used to it as a dream.

Chris is aware for every second of his first shift because he has a broken arm and a broken ankle at the time, and the _wrench_ of the shift further shatters them. 

He wakes screaming into someone’s else’s hand. They’re on top of him, whoever they are, their knees grinding into his back, forearm barred over his neck. More hands are holding his legs and arms down, even as white-hot fire seems to pour through his limbs. He screams and he fights against them. His bones crack and for a moment he thinks his sight has gone inward, within his body, seeing the jagged edges as they rip and gash the flesh around them. Then some great force bends his body back, as if he were mere clay clenched in its hand, and he goes blind.

When he comes back to himself, he still thinks he’s blind for the first few seconds. The world looks so strange, all shadows and red flares and sickening flits of white, that he assumes his mind is just making up hallucinations to fill in for the loss. Then he pushes himself up, and though his shaky limbs can’t hold him for more than a second, the way things around him shift with the movement tell him that that is what he’s truly seeing.

He falls back onto the—carpet. He’s on a carpet. His arm and his leg still hurt but the ache is already fading. The bones are healed, they can hold his weight, it’s only that he doesn’t seem to know his muscles anymore. He tries to sit up and his hips lift instead. He wants to push his hands out and instead grabs something. Someone.

“Easy, Argent,” they say, pushing him off. Their voice is tired, frustrated. It vibrates under the words and Chris hears _stronger-stranger-bow-your-head_. “None of us have the energy to chase you across the town tonight.”

Chris backs up, feels his shoulders strain away from the other person, his—his ears pin back. It’s a strange sensation, the stretch of muscle across both sides of his face. He absently rubs at his cheek and claws skitter across his skin.

“ _Hey_ ,” says another voice, and then a clawed hand slashes at his hip. When he snarls and twists away, the person snarls back and humps into view.

 _Bigger-younger-stronger_ he’s a black blot with two glowing blue stars where his eyes should be. He snarls again and paired flashes of white appear. More white marks out his claws.

Then he’s shouldered aside. “Stop it, Derek,” a third person says. It’s a woman’s voice but it’s coming from a dark, oblong lump behind the one threatening Chris. The lump shifts, top seeming to pull in on itself, then excretes a limb that wraps around the threatening one, weakly hooks him back. “He’s just turned, you know that.”

“At least the full moon is a good two weeks off.” It’s the first voice speaking, bitter and angry, and not grateful at all.

Chris edges backwards till he can see all three of them. His eyes are starting to adjust, and he can make out colors, features. Then his feet hit the wall and he startles, and the world seems to snap around his head in a dizzying spiral.

He whimpers and puts his head down. There’s a snarl and then a sharp bark, further off, and he hears the snarl and the bark but he also hears _weak_ and _leave-stop_. His head hurts. He presses further into the carpet, then freezes, hearing someone move towards him.

“He’s remarkably tame,” the first voice observes. “Do you think that’s the lapdog in him?”

“Shut up, Peter,” the woman says. “Do you really think that will help?”

Peter— _Hale_ , Chris suddenly remembers. He crawls towards Chris, head held higher than Chris, hands spread wide, shoulders jutting ahead, but his teeth and claws aren’t showing. He’s making a soft, low, rumbling sound, _calm-calm-no-harm-submit-stay-calm_ , as he circles slightly wide of Chris, then slowly reaches one arm forward. His hand floats towards Chris’ face and Chris jerks back, only to find himself trapped as Peter’s other hand seizes the back of his neck. 

Chris twists around, slashing with his claws, but Peter is faster, throwing himself behind Chris, wrapping up against Chris’ back to lock Chris’ arms to his sides. He turns into Chris’ kicking, letting it turn them so he’s beneath, but then his teeth prick into Chris’ nape, just shy of the hairline.

He snarls, lower, slower than before. _Kill_ , it says, and Chris lets out a ragged, denying cry, fury drowning in a sudden icy wave of fear. His body goes leaden, his limbs turn limp—he doesn’t know what’s going on for a moment and his mind freezes too, just unable to understand.

But the teeth don’t sink in any deeper. Peter holds them there for another moment, then moves his head away. His breath pelts the back of Chris’ neck as he blows it out. It tickles and Chris moves before he can help himself; Peter tightens his grip on him, then, realizing it won’t be repeated, sighs again and begins to drag them up against the wall so they’re leaning against it.

“Stop,” Peter mutters, and then lets his head fall against the back of Chris’ skull. He rests it there for a second, then moves it so his chin is digging into Chris’ shoulder. “Pull yourself together, Argent. You need to, it’ll start to hurt in a moment and we can’t afford to let you out tonight. You need to deal with it.”

Chris doesn’t know what he means, but now that the fear is washing out, he can feel how warm the other man is at his back. He knows who Peter is but—he’s a werewolf. A werewolf. He’s shifted. Christ.

Peter makes a soft, shushing sound, almost soothing. He resettles his arms around Chris and it’s not—right, but it’s close to something else, something that Chris does need. Some prickle that’s starting all over Chris’ skin, where something should be but isn’t, and Peter holding him is reminding him of it.

“We should just chain him up,” Derek— _Derek_ grumbles. He sits next to his sister, one hand over her shoulder, black lines snaking over it and up his arm. “Peter. Come on. We need to go out, take care of—are you even listening to me?”

The prickle turns into an itch, and then, as if someone’s flipped a switch, into a vicious twisting ache in Chris’ gut. It’s like the cold, like staying out too long and then coming inside and having the thaw set fire to the bones. And Peter is _too_ warm now, burning on top of burning.

Chris tries to push away, only to have Peter jerk him roughly back. Peter’s face pushes into the side of Chris’ throat and Chris hisses, going still, but. Peter doesn’t bite. He doesn’t even open his mouth, just—sniffs at him. Long, sucking sniffs, burrowing so close that Chris can feel the damp inside of the man’s nostrils, and when Chris twists away from them, Peter wrenches him back so hard that Chris’ elbows grate.

“Peter!” Derek snaps. He arches over his sister, planting his hands on the carpet, then sinks back as if to leap. “Goddamn it, Peter—”

“Smells, you can still smell—” Peter mumbles. He begins to rub his face into the join of Chris’ neck and shoulder, where phantom teeth still worry at the flesh. He’s still inhaling deep and now his exhales are uneven, rasping. One seems to catch in his throat, and then he coughs it out and presses his brow into Chris’ shoulder, gasping lowly. Then he laughs. It’s short, rough, a little hysterical, and it cuts off when he shoves his face so far into Chris’ throat that he seems determined to suffocate himself.

“Chris,” Laura says. She heaves herself over and puts her hand on Derek’s arm. “Chris. Listen, Chris, listen to me. Are you—”

“’m—not—” Speaking is like scooping through a bucket of nails looking for a screw. Chris can understand what they’re saying and he knows what words he wants, but it aches to pull them out. It aches just to think. To remember and be aware and to—just know. “Hurts, don’t—stay.”

He can’t, he thinks dully. It hurts. It hurts, and even Peter twisting tighter and tighter around him, even the creak of his bones from that, it’s not enough of a distraction. It hurts and he doesn’t think he can take it, but he can’t seem to bring himself to move.

He _can’t_ move. There’s only one way he could go and he can’t. If Stiles had wanted Chris along, he would have taken him, but the man had stormed out alone.

“Still smell,” Peter repeats, voice cracking. He brings his knees up and pinches them into either side of Chris, even as he starts to shake.

Derek strains against Laura’s hand but his head is down, his hands gripping at the carpet. Laura swears softly and pushes her hand up his arm. She tries to use it to help herself sit up, but halfway up her strength fails. She curses louder and Derek twists, grabs her.

He cradles her for a moment, while she buries her face in his chest. She’s saying something and Chris can pick out every other word—and then he makes himself stop, focus on Peter’s shuddering breath instead, because the noises are all crowding in otherwise.

Chris looks up and Derek’s right in front of him. The man looks angry and miserable, and he hangs back until his sister unwinds her arm from around his neck to loop it over Chris’ knee, pulling them together. Then he rushes into Chris’ chest, whining softly, his cheek rocking up inch by inch till he’s squabbling with Peter over that side of Chris’ neck.

Laura growls. _Stop_ , it says, and she grimaces when she hears herself but her brother and her uncle still, then settle down. She glances at Chris and gives him a sour smile, then attempts to push herself back. But her arm fails her again. She flops against Chris’ knee and glances at him again, defensive, then shrugs and just slumps where she is.

It doesn’t help at all with the pain. It makes it _worse_. Chris starts to black out, that’s how much it hurts, and the others just crowd closer. He snarls and then he whimpers and then he just tries to breathe, but they don’t let up, and soon he’s slipped back into unconsciousness.

* * *

“Hey,” Stiles says, and Peter drops half the cards.

Peter’s mouth tightens, but he merely tucks away the cards he still has, then bends over to scoop up the rest as Stiles leans against the doorway. Then he stands up, and moves around Derek to offer his arm to Laura. He helps her off the ledgers and gives Derek’s back an absent dusting, then a tug to straighten out the man’s coat. Then he nudges both to the side so Chris can make his way to the door, the chest of Scott’s things under one arm.

Stiles’ brows rise, but he doesn’t comment. He swings out of the doorway, then tips on his hat and cocks his head for them to follow them.

The warehouse is eerily silent all of a sudden. There are still men around, though Chris guesses that their number’s down by a third. Most of them are off against the walls or high up on stacks of crates. They’re not all werewolves, but enough of them are that their eyes look like fireflies in the deep shadows.

“How many of them are yours?” Chris asks.

He’s still a little behind Stiles, as is appropriate, but when Stiles glances over and doesn’t find Chris, he drops back so that they’re level with each other. Chris can sense the interest in the warehouse soar so high it’s beating itself bloody against the roof, but Stiles just snorts and waves his hand.

“None,” he says, leading them towards a side door. He shakes out a cigarette and lights it with a match, then tosses the match to the side. 

It comes dangerously close to landing in a patch of hay before a workman dives and catches it between slapping palms. Stiles looks over, grins and tells the foreman to slip the man a bonus. Then he steps through the door and outside.

“I inherited most of them,” he continues. He wanders down the alley a few feet, till he reaches a parked car, and then leans against its front as they file out the door. “Loyalty oaths and submission don’t make a pack, you know.”

“We’re aware,” Laura says, with the family dryness. She’s the last one out and she glances back over her shoulder, frowning at something. Then her head snaps back around and she sucks in a breath.

Stiles has just run his hand down the hood of the car. Chris is expecting something, but even he flinches at the fireworks show that follows in the wake of Stiles’ hand. An iridescent film seems to ripple across the car’s exterior, with brilliant lancing bolts of green and blue. It goes towards the back, then comes forward again like a bounced ripple in water, finishing with a shower of red sparks dropping out of the bottom of the car.

“Well, that’s a relief,” Stiles says, taking his cigarette out. He blows twin streams of smoke from his nose, then backs up and opens both doors on the passenger side. “I hate having to replace cars. Expensive as hell these days, what with all the work you’ve got to put into them.”

“You don’t have guards watching it?” Derek says. He sounds a little outraged at these absent guards.

Chris looks at Laura, who grimaces and trades Peter’s arm for Derek’s, just as Stiles laughs. “Somebody’s gonna fuck with it, they’re the first ones in line for the bribe,” Stiles says. He walks back around the front of the car and then opens the driver’s side door. “All right, come on, I had an evening date I still want to try and make.”

“Shut _up_ ,” Chris mutters as he passes Derek. He doesn’t look back to see the other man’s reaction and gets into shotgun.

It’s a very nice car for most people, but it’s not the latest model, and the customizations inside have little to do with comfort and more to do with making it easier to stash certain categories of items. That surprises Chris, and then he snorts at himself for being so used to the Hales. After all, Peter had admitted once that the slightly overlong cut of the sleeves on Stiles’ suit-coats had made him assume the man couldn’t be very high up the Outfit hierarchy.

Stiles’ clothes now look just as nice as Peter’s, although he treats them as carelessly as he had in Beacon Hills. At the first intersection, he stops to pull off his cuff-links. At the next, he rumples up his cuffs to bare half his forearms, and then flicks away the cigarette ash that’d been dribbling onto his front.

At the third intersection, he slouches and looks into the backseat. “You cozy back there?”

It’s a tight fit for three people, so instead Laura has opted for sitting on Peter’s lap, and having Derek keep her hat and purse on his lap. “I think we’ll be fine,” she says.

“Well, if you say so,” Stiles sighs, and turns back around.

He doesn’t say another word until they pull up to the loading dock of a very swanky, very exclusive hotel Chris saw once in a newsreel about a dinner held for the President. The workmen hanging around the dock jump to attention, and in a few minutes the car’s been driven away and they’re being led towards the most spotless freight elevator Chris has ever seen. A valet in a suit nicer than anything Chris had ever worn—at least till Peter had started ordering his clothes—hands them little heated towels as they step into the elevator, and when they get out, another valet takes the used towels with gold tongs.

They’re on one of the midlevel floors and Chris can sense Peter pondering why that and not the penthouse, if Stiles is going for luxury after all. Then they turn the corner and the window at the end of the hall shows the roof of the neighboring building, so close it’s barely a step for a werewolf to cross the intervening space.

“Even alpha healing has trouble with a long drop,” Stiles says, apparently reading their thoughts. “Don’t know if you’ve been following the papers, but it’s a little bit of a trend this month. Might want to bring an umbrella when you’re walking around the taller buildings.”

“Duly noted,” Peter says.

Stiles snorts, then jabs his key into the lock like it’s a stiletto. Peter grimaces and turns away, sharing a quick look with Laura. Then he turns back, since the door is swinging open.

The suite beyond the door follows pattern: spacious and clearly expensive, but it’s not lived-in besides a few books here and there, and a large chest shoved up against one wall. When Stiles doesn’t do anything but toss his hat aside and then wander towards a bedroom, Chris goes to the chest and sets down Scott’s things on top of it. He’s near the windows and he glances out to see a well-lit but half-empty street, while two blocks down, the sky over the buildings seems to burst with flickering lights. All the music’s coming from that direction, too.

“People seem to change their minds about which street’s got the best clubs and speakeasies every other week. This was the place to be last year, though of course, I didn’t move in till this year,” Stiles says, coming back out. He’s swapped his suit-coat and has a fresh tie slung around his neck, unknotted, and he’s putting different cuff-links on. “All right, what do you want?”

“Not to impose,” Peter says after a long, awkward silence. He takes his hat off but keeps it in his hand. The living room has a sunken floor and he comes down the first step, so he’s looking up at Stiles. “Simply stating a fact, Stiles, the Calaveras put everyone at risk. They’re part of the temperance movement as well as—”

“I _know_ who they are.” Rolling his eyes, Stiles walks along the top of the sunken floor.

Chris thinks he’s angling for the liquor cabinet to Chris’ right, and is moving out of the way when Stiles snarls at him, eyes flashing red. Then the other man pivots sharply on his heel, and when Chris backs up, he chases till he has Chris pinned against the back of an armchair. He’s got his hands busy with his tie but he doesn’t need them; Chris’ arms fall straight to his sides without conscious thought, then twist so that his claws unsheathe straight into the chair.

Derek starts to say something. It’s angry, and the anger doesn’t hide that it’s also envious, and Stiles snorts and cants one hip forward to grind up against Chris. He slips the thick end of his tie through the loose knot, then leans over, cocks his head. His breath settles hot and wet on the side of Chris’ neck and Chris shudders and twists his head aside for the other man, even as he tries to level out his breathing.

“This,” Stiles mutters. The ends of his tie flick against Chris’ chest. He’s looking over Chris’ shoulder at the others. “This. Right? You wait till I calm down, bring me my new beta? Hey, we lost your last one, stopped at the farm and got you a new one?”

“We didn’t come for _that_ ,” Chris manages to grate out. He feels one of his claws stick, hitting the chair’s frame. Then Stiles presses so close that his nose grazes along Chris’ throat and Chris jams that claw in as far as it can go, trying to swallow down his whimper. “Stiles—”

“Don’t fucking lie, I can hear it.” Stiles laughs, sharp and short. He abruptly drops his hands to Chris’ hips, grips them so they tilt up. Lets go when Chris can’t hold back the caught breath, then wraps one hand up in Chris’ tie, forcing Chris to tip his head forward.

With his other hand he rubs up from the line of Chris’ jaw, over Chris’ left cheek and then across the top of Chris’ head. He sends Chris’ hat tumbling off and then drags his fingers down the back of the skull, raking stinging furrows through Chris’ hair, till he can grab the back of Chris’ neck.

“This, right?” he says.

The whimper crowds up into Chris’ throat again, and stabs out when he tries to swallow it. So he growls over it, even as someone else starts to snarl. “Can’t help _wanting_ ,” he hisses at Stiles. “But doesn’t mean—we don’t expect a damn thing. Just—we’ll _die_ back there—”

“And I care—” Stiles snaps, yanking Chris’ head back.

“Thought you’d want to know, at least,” Chris snarls. He stares at Stiles. The red in the man’s eyes isn’t uniform. It pulses brighter just around the iris.

And it fades out in stages. Most of it pulls out like a curtain drawing back, but there’s a faint webbing that lasts a little longer. Then Stiles snorts again. He lets go of Chris and stands back. “I always have to pick the goddamn stubborn ones,” he mutters. He shakes out his coat, then plucks absently at his flipped lapel. “You couldn’t just kill each other?”

That’s to the room in general. Chris works his claws free of the chair, catching his breath, and twists around to see Peter with his hands spread and palms up, a helpless gesture that doesn’t match the tight, thin-lipped expression on the man’s face.

Stiles shrugs carelessly, as if he finds that funny. Then he steps around Chris, heading for the door, and before Laura can stop him, Derek jerks forward. His hand goes out and his fingers curl uncertainly in the air, bare inches from Stiles’ elbow. “Stiles,” he says. “We’re sorry. We—we should’ve—”

“Yes, I _know_ ,” Stiles says, cracking each word like a whip.

He turns his shoulder to Derek and walks the rest of the way to the door. Doesn’t bother to get his hat as he leaves.

“Goddamn it, Derek,” Laura starts.

“Leave it.” Then Derek turns around and snarls at his sister, even though it’d been Peter who’d let out that frustrated sigh. “Just shut up, all right, I know, now leave me—”

He swipes the air with his claws, then brings his hands into his hips as fists. His feet thud deep into the carpeting as he stalks off towards the nearest door. When it won’t open for him, he jerks his hand back as if to beat it, then just snarls and flings himself at the next door. That one opens for him, and he storms into the room with a back-kick that nearly breaks the door against its jamb.

Chris laughs under his breath, taking a seat in the armchair he’s just mangled. Peter’s head goes up and his lips curl into a sneer, but the sound of breaking porcelain turns him away and back towards Derek. He sucks in air, then sets his shoulders and stalks after his nephew.

“You’re not helping.” Laura doesn’t sound particularly accusing. She’s not even looking at Chris; she’s watching whatever Peter and Derek are doing in the room, her eyes tracking back and forth as snarls erupt in fits and starts.

Then she sighs. She drops her hat and purse onto another chair, then combs the hair raggedly back from her face. Her brows jump at something in the other room, and then she turns away with a disgusted sound. She looks at Chris, who shrugs, and then she walks past two other chairs to seat herself on the arm of Chris’ chair.

“At least he didn’t ship us right back,” Laura says after a moment.

Chris leans forward so he can prop his elbows on his knees. He feels something brush up against his foot and looks down to see his hat, which he kicks away. Then he puts his head between his hands. He pushes them evenly into the sides of his face for a few seconds, then stops kidding himself and slides one back to hook over his neck, where he can still feel Stiles’ hand.

Laura makes a stifled, thin noise. When he looks over, her head is bowed, her hands twisting in a knot on her crossed knees. She has her lip caught between her teeth, and where it’s not caught, it’s trembling.

She starts to get up and Chris sighs and puts his arm out. He curls it over her shoulder as she slips down to sit next to him, then lets that slide to loosely ring her waist. She tenses and then she goes suddenly slack against him, and her head tilts to lean into his shoulder.

“Maybe we should’ve written ahead,” she says.

Peter’s growl booms out of the other room, as tired as it is triumphant, and then an uneasy silence falls across the apartment. Chris makes himself concentrate and he hears Peter’s heartbeat beginning to slow; Derek’s thrums like a hummingbird for a couple more seconds, then gradually starts to drag. They’re both up against one of the walls, close together, and the longer Chris listens, the closer the two men’s heartbeats come to matching.

“That would have been stupid,” Chris finally says to Laura. 

She pulls away to look at him. Then she looks at the floor, her mouth twisting. Her head moves back and he feels her lips touch his cheek. It’s not a kiss, she’s just resting them there, and then she drops her head to his shoulder again.

“I didn’t think it’d go well, however we came up,” Laura says dryly. She pauses, then sighs. “Wonder why it hurts anyway.”

There’s no point in answering. Chris just rubs his hand along her side and sighs with her.

* * *

The first few days they keep him in the penthouse, in a concrete-walled room with no windows and just a mattress on the floor, and the lights turned off, and it’s probably the nicest thing a Hale has ever done for Chris.

Sounds alone are maddening. The concrete deadens most of it, but Chris’ own heartbeat—the way he can hear it drumming through every little vein now, not just in his chest—drives him to beat his forehead bloody against the wall. And when he wakes to someone lifting his head, their hands over his ears, it doubles the agony because he can hear _their_ heart thundering through their palms.

He whines, struggles and they snarl him into flattening, then pick up his head by his hair and shove him face-first into—it’s liquid, it’s warmer than his skin but cooling fast. It’s richer than cream, tasting like the best meal of his life, and he thinks he can feel his eyes snapping their muscles as they roll back into his head.

They don’t let him drown in it, because he wakes up again. He’s starting to learn to tune out the sounds, but smells crowd in: blood. Blood, blood, and more blood. Blood and piss and fear and shit and someone is scolding someone else, telling them to clean the hunter off their hands before they come in. Then they give him another bowl of that stuff and Chris slurps unashamedly at it. When it’s gone, he rubs at his filthy face with his hands and then sucks at his fingers. He can’t stop even when a harsh laugh scrapes across his ears, making him cringe.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen somebody this bad,” says—Derek, and then the lights go on.

Chris snarls and screams at the same time, and throws himself into the corner of the room so hard he feels more than hears his skull fracturing. The lights go off and he wants to say, through the pain and the dizziness, that it’s not necessary, he’s already going dark. But all he manages before passing out is hearing someone shove Derek out.

The next time, he’s lying on his belly, with something sweetish and a little stinging scenting the air. There’s a hand on his back, rubbing in slow circles, though it stops as soon as he moves.

“Argent?” Laura says.

He can’t quite work his mouth so he nods. He works his arm under himself, then pushes up on it. The reverberation of their heartbeats—of _three_ hearts, he suddenly realizes—drones in a whirling circle around him but he grits his teeth and breathes in slowly, and manages to push it off.

The third person smells like…there’s something oily, something crisp like citrus, a little silky soap. A long, earthy afternote, like the bottom of a pile of leaves left out in the rain. “Peter,” Chris mutters.

“Well, so you’re back with us.” Peter leans over his head, then lifts it by the chin and gently sets something down in front of Chris. “Drink up.”

“It’s deer blood, with a little red wine to keep it from clotting,” Laura says. She’s moved to wrap her hands around Chris’ shoulders. “If you can walk, we’ll see if we can get to the preserve tonight, get a real kill down your throat, but if not, it’ll…”

“It’s not good enough but it’ll keep you going,” Peter says bluntly.

Chris sniffs his way to the…bowl. He almost plunges straight into it, but just catches himself on his forearms. Then he forces his head to drop slowly, carefully, so he can lap at it. He’d pick it up but his hands are shaking and they almost upend the bowl when he just tries to push them underneath to hold it higher, so he has to drink it like that.

It’s cold. Thick. A little sour from the wine. It tastes like the dried-up memory of something heavenly, and he licks up every last drop, cleaning his mouth and chin with his fingers. 

Peter laughs and pulls at Chris’ chin again, except that Chris is awake now. Aware—though he doesn’t really understand the vicious anger that bolts through him at Peter’s touch. He’s slapped back the other man and yanked himself into a stiff crouch before he knows it.

“Don’t make me throw you out too,” Laura says sharply.

She has a growling undertone to her voice, but it’s strangely soothing, like the smooth purr of a good engine. And she’s—not threatening, she’s keeping her head lower than Chris’, rubbing her shoulder into his side.

“Well, forgive me for being kind.” Peter sits on his heels, a handkerchief still crumpled in one hand. It’s spotted with a little blood from Chris’ face.

Chris remembers Stiles wiping him off and it’s like pokers shaped into hands at the end, burning across the bottom of his face. Branding over Peter’s touch. He snarls, hiking his shoulders up and backwards, and Peter suddenly snarls back. Jaw dropping to show all his fangs, all the muscles in his neck and shoulders and upper arms flexing out, _try-try-try_ in his voice.

“Peter,” Laura snaps. “Peter, _now_?”

For a moment Peter doesn’t appear to hear. Then he rocks back and stands up in the same motion. He’s much taller all of a sudden, but his claws and fangs disappear and Chris can see a straight line to his throat. It’s confusing.

Peter knows it, smiling broadly, though he keeps his lips together. “Eventually,” he says, staring down at Chris. He starts to turn, then glances at Laura. “You know, eventually.”

Laura bridles as Peter leaves, then snaps at Chris when he starts to move. Her fangs click and there’s an odd echo in her voice, deeper and more solid than Peter’s. It gives Chris pause and Laura takes advantage of that to slide away from him.

She rubs the side of her face, then across her eyes. “You need to kill something, get that out of the way. It’ll help.”

“I know,” Chris says. His throat feels rusty and awkward, moving around the words. He pushes his fingers into the side of his neck, then shakes his head. “Is he—is he challenging you?”

Laura looks sharply at him, then flashes her own teeth. They’re blunt but they still make Chris stiffen. “About time that hunter background helped out,” she mutters, getting to her feet. “Worry about not going insane first, Argent.”

“Preserve,” Chris says, and then his voice fails him. He coughs into his arm. “My—Gerard’s—”

“Stiles didn’t leave a body for us to show around, unfortunately. Some of them have run off, but there are a few who still think he’s just missing, or that we have him.” Laura’s lips peel back from her teeth. Then she shakes her head, and her silent snarl turns into a dark chuckle. “He didn’t miss a trick, did he. If he’d been on our side—”

She stops, then looks out the door. Her hands curl into fists and then grind over her thighs.

“Anyway, they have pulled out of the tunnels, I’m guessing because they can’t work around Gerard’s wards without him,” Laura finally says. “Sheriff’s back on our side, too. We’re careful and we’re quick, we can get you a deer or a boar.”

Chris nods and pulls himself back into a sitting position against the wall. His head is pounding, and when his concentration slips he still has waves of dizziness that make him want to vomit. Peter left the door open and the light in the next room is also off, but there’s light coming into it from somewhere else. Probably a window, from how it’s not brassy yellow. It must be night time.

Laura stands over him for a few more minutes, just watching him pick at himself. They’ve changed his clothes, washed him. Haven’t shaved him; he fingers his jaw and then winces at the memory that brings up. He didn’t even like the man. Still doesn’t. It’s not liking, what Stiles did to him; liking doesn’t cut its way in like a surgeon.

“I’m leaving the door open. You need to get used to your senses and there’s not enough in here to stretch them. But if you leave without one of us, we’ll start chaining you up,” Laura says.

“He left me.” Chris looks up at her. “He sent me out of town with the Whittemores, you know, and knew I’d come back. And then he left me.”

Laura’s eyes widen slightly, and her heartbeat skips a few times, but aside from that she doesn’t move. She doesn’t look angry or jealous, or even very upset. Just thinks it over. For all that Peter’s probably cleverer, Chris can see why she can still hold him at bay, even without alpha status.

“He didn’t kill you,” she says. “We’ll start there.”

Chris laughs under his breath. “He didn’t kill you either.”

She doesn’t reply, although her head lowers for a bare second. Laura steps towards the door, pauses, and then leaves the room. The door stays open as promised, but Chris doesn’t even look towards it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Commission was a body within Prohibition-era organized crime made up of various leading gangsters and bootleggers, whose purpose was to help coordinate criminal activities and mediate disputes between different criminal groups. 
> 
> The Chicago Outfit was a Chicago-based organized crime group, of which Al Capone was the head during the height of Prohibition. At its height, it and its affiliated groups reached almost Coast-to-Coast.
> 
> It didn't happen till 1941, but the death of former mob hitman Abe "Kid Twist" Reles, who fell out a hotel window while being guarded as a key witness in Albert Anastasia's trial, was always suspected to be a mob hit even though it was officially ruled a suicide.
> 
> I personally found the opening episodes pretty ridiculous in how fast Scott got used to his new senses, and how he apparently never had a bad case of sensory overload, even though I absolutely do not expect common sense out of TW.


	2. Chapter 2

Stiles doesn’t come back that night, although the Hales take turns keeping watch in the living room. Chris doesn’t sleep either, but that’s not much of a choice on his part. Even if it smells like Stiles, the place is still strange and the city outside is a complete unknown; Chris traveled around a fair bit, before everything had gone wrong, but never east of the Mississippi.

He can’t relax enough for sleep so he spends his time exploring the suite. Surprisingly enough, only that one door seems to be barred to them. From the layout he’s guessing it’s an office or something of that nature: the rest of the place consists of three bedrooms, each with their own bathroom, a small galley kitchen, and a utility room with a dumbwaiter, a laundry chute, and a back exit to a servants’ stairwell. One bedroom has enough clothes in the closet to be assigned to Stiles, and when Chris lifts the lid to the water tank over the toilet, he spots a familiar oilskin packet, but otherwise it’s as strangely bare as the rest of the place.

Chris comes out of the bathroom and then pauses as Derek hunches up from the bed. The other man is on top of the sheets, with his shoes and socks off, and his coat and tie hanging from the footboard. He’s holding himself up on his hands but there’s a rumpled depression in the sheets between them, like he was burrowing face-down.

His fingers clench in as Chris moves, then uncurl as Chris simply crosses the room to the other door. He turns his head to follow but the seething, daring edge to his scowl softens, and by the time Chris walks out into the living room, Derek’s dropped himself to the bed with a weary huff.

It’s Peter’s turn, apparently. Peter has found a book somewhere and is stretched out on the sofa, reading it. A tumbler of whiskey sits in front of him on the coffee table. He reaches towards it as Chris comes in, then pulls his arm back when Chris keeps going down the hall to the next bedroom. He doesn’t look up from the book.

Laura’s made herself at home in that bedroom, which is clearly an unused spare. She’s cleaned off her make-up and pulled off her dress, and is sitting up against the headboard, sheets pooled around her waist. She hugs her knees tighter to her as Chris sits down on the edge of the bed, but doesn’t otherwise move. She’s still like that when, down to shirt and trousers, he rolls over and slides under the sheets, and pretends to fall asleep.

Breakfast the next day comes with a note that Stiles is out on business for a couple days, but that they can stay in the apartment. He doesn’t leave any way to get hold of him, which sets Derek to arguing with Laura and then Peter. Derek gets worse when lunch comes up with their luggage, retrieved from their hotel without their knowledge, and finally Laura drags him out to walk around the city.

“That a good idea?” Chris says, watching them go.

“Unless you want to spend the whole time sitting on his head.” Peter’s still picking over lunch, sitting on the sofa and leaning over the tray on the coffee table. He glances up as Chris comes down the steps to the bottom of the living room, then shrugs. “He reeks almost as much as you do, even if Stiles hasn’t spread the word around. And I tend to think his men have, at least. Any alpha with any sense will sit on their hands and see.”

Chris bends down and pulls out the midday paper from under the tray. He shakes it out. “‘Yet another heartless daytime assassination by the ruthless gangsters that plague our fine city,’” he reads. “‘Once again they have shown that they lack the slightest morals, and indeed, any sense of propriety, turning their bullets so close to an establishment frequented by innocent women and children. If left unchecked, they shall inevitably destroy the fabric of society.’”

“Very fine enunciation, Chris, but I think your tone is lacking a little in color,” Peter drawls. He makes a small, upwards pushing motion with one hand. “You should _feel_ the outrage.”

“I should—” Then Chris stops himself. He does snap shut the paper and toss it at Peter—who easily bats it aside—but that’s reflex more than real anger.

When he sits down, on the opposite side of the table, Peter picks up the bread basket and holds it out to him. “You should eat something,” Peter says, more soberly. He shakes the basket, sets it down in front of Chris, and then settles back to nibble at some leftover ham. “Laura will keep him out of trouble, you know that. If they see another alpha they’ll run right back here.”

“If the alpha follows them?” Chris says.

“Well, then we fight, obviously, and I suppose Stiles may have a chance to have us dead after all.” Then Peter sighs and pushes the tray away from him. “What are you expecting from me, Chris? Optimism? Undying faith? Have I ever struck you as sentimental?”

“You’re usually a little more in favor of survival,” Chris says. His stomach does ache, and he has to admit that wallowing in that is a little silly in light of everything else. 

So he reaches for a piece of bread, only to pause as he glimpses something out of the corner of his eye. He puts his hand down and sits back and that _is_ Stiles’ hat, crushed nearly under the sofa cushions behind Peter.

“I think it might have helped to kick Derek off his bed sooner,” Chris says after a second. “He’s been delusional enough that Stiles is just angry at us.”

“He’s not delusional,” Peter snaps. Then he smiles viciously at Chris. He’s trying to pull his charm down like a shield, but even if Chris couldn’t smell it, it’d be obvious how ruffled he is. “And if he is, it’s none of your business, Argent. Your family’s done enough to test his sanity.”

Chris stares at him, then looks away. He checks the window to see that the sky is indeed still there, and that they haven’t sunk into some hellish circus, and then he looks back at Peter. “Peter, for God’s sake, if now is when you want to—”

There’s a knock at the door. They both twist to face it and Chris senses more than hears Peter slide across the couch so Chris isn’t obstructing his view. Neither of them would be in the immediate line of fire but Chris gets his foot up on the chair seat, crouching anyway, and then the door swings open and Stiles walks in.

“Hey,” he says. He pauses, listening, then blinks once in surprise. Then he shrugs. “Well, can’t stay in all day, I guess. Chris, come on.”

Chris is half-on his feet before he catches himself. He glances back at Peter, but Peter is just settling back on the couch, the newspaper spread over his knees. The other man stretches his arms out to the either side of them as if he’s making himself comfortable, looking at the paper.

“I think he can entertain himself,” Stiles says dryly.

“Stop staring, Chris,” Peter mutters. He smooths one hand over the paper. His chin jerks in towards his chest another fraction.

Chris taps his fingers on the back of the chair, then pushes away from it and goes up to Stiles, who ushers him out and along the hall to the elevator. “We’re not going that far, just to the restaurant downstairs,” Stiles says. “Got to meet somebody.”

“I’m not dressed,” Chris says after a moment. His coat and tie are still back in the room, and so are his cuff-links. He considers the cuffs flapping around his wrists, then starts to roll up his sleeves.

Stiles laughs. “Don’t worry, it’s nothing formal. A couple people were just asking about my beta, want to see the proof for themselves.”

As he speaks he puts his hand on Chris’ arm, then slides it up onto Chris’ shoulder. By the time they reach the elevator, his fingers are curling around Chris’ shirt-collar. Chris closes his eyes and the other man’s hand is a soft, spreading weight, like a blanket thrown over his head.

He opens his eyes. The elevator doors are already open. Stiles steps inside and his hand drags at Chris, who hisses through clenched teeth but who keeps his feet planted on the other side.

Stiles turns, frowning, while the elevator operator grimaces and slips as far to the side, and away from them, as he can. Then he leans out, holding onto the folded metal grating. “Are you kidding me?” he says. “There’s no way you all made friends.”

“We didn’t. But this isn’t fair,” Chris says.

A scarlet web flows across Stiles’ eyes. “Fair,” he says incredulously. “Fair. What are you—do you think it’s all back to the same now? Do you really think—they don’t give a damn about you. You’re just a means to an end.”

“I think if the choice is between a means and a trophy, I choose the one where I have use,” Chris says. He puts up his hand against the wall beside the elevator, then pushes himself back, out from under Stiles’ hand. Then he takes another step that way. “If that’s what you’re going to do with me, then make me.”

The web of red thickens, from lace to faint overlying glow. Then Stiles snorts, and his eyes clear. He steps towards the middle of the elevator, rubbing his hand against his hip. Then he twists and falls back-first against the elevator wall. He pulls out one of his cigarettes and holds the lighter to the end.

“Down,” he says to the elevator operator.

The man doesn’t come out from his corner, but he starts to push the grating across. “You don’t give a damn about me either,” Chris says, over the whine and squeak of it.

Stiles’ eyes flick up while the rest of his head stays angled down. He snaps shut his lighter and moves his cigarette aside. “And you do.”

“Well, my cross to bear,” Chris says. He watches the doors slide shut and the elevator begin to descend.

He doesn’t turn around till the top of the elevator’s showing. The hallway back to the room is only about five yards, but it feels like five hundred miles into the heart of winter. Chris hunches his shoulders and pushes at the door.

“Very honorable of you,” Peter says as Chris comes in.

Chris exhales viciously. He clears the door only by as much as he needs to, then heels it shut and lets his back fall against it. “Fuck you, Peter. It wasn’t for you.”

“Oh, I know, it’s never for me, is it?” Peter says, as light as a daisy. He’s already crowding up to Chris, forearm coming down besides Chris’ head, other hand caging in at Chris hip. His eyes half-close. “I accept that. I know no one feels sorry for me, so is it so bad if I do?”

“Peter,” Chris starts. He pushes his hand into Peter’s chest, then sighs and lets his head fall back.

Under the half-mast lids, Peter’s eyes glitter with anger. Then he shuts them completely, and forces himself against Chris’ hand till their brows are just touching. He takes a long, deep breath, and then chuckles quietly.

“Divide and conquer, even when he’s furious, he thinks,” he says. “He’s perfect, isn’t he?”

His voice cracks on ‘perfect’ and he twists his head to the side in a denying motion, then takes another breath. This one shudders and sucks over his teeth, and when Chris sighs again, slides his hand up to tangle in Peter’s tie, it goes completely to pieces.

Peter curses to himself, bends back as if to pull away, and then just puts his other arm up so he’s boxing his forearms along either side of Chris’ head. He cranes his head over even more and drags his cheek against Chris’ cheek; his legs spread as Chris pushes a knee between them, then snap like a vise around Chris’ thigh.

He arches up against Chris, bowing from hips up to his shoulders, as their erections align briefly, then grind maddeningly apart. It’s slow, sensual as the slink of a silk scarf, but his breathing is short and frantic in Chris’ ear. It stutters when Chris takes a double fistful of his vest, then explodes in a harsh pop as Chris twists half-over, rides the edge of his hip right over Peter’s cock.

Chris squeezes his arm up, loops it over Peter’s neck and drags him as close as possible. Peter takes the hint and smashes into him, slamming forearms into the door, jamming one knee back behind and under Chris’ lifting leg. He forces Chris off one foot, rutting along Chris’ other thigh, and Chris takes the chance, hikes his hanging leg up and hooks it around Peter’s as they writhe against the door.

He sinks his claws into Peter’s shoulders as he comes, but remembers to pull them out before they make more than pinpricks. Peter rams their hips into the door twice more, snarling, and rakes ribbons out of the sides of Chris’ clothes. When he lets Chris down, he has a crazed glint to his smile, and he juts his head forward so his teeth clip at Chris’ throat.

Chris lets his arm fall onto Peter’s head, slide and glance off his cheek, pushing off the bared teeth. Peter resists for a second and Chris snarls at the man, then pushes his hip up into Peter’s groin. It earns him a hiss and a shivering crack in Peter’s concentration; Chris grabs Peter by the waist and shoves him back, then swipes at the underside of Peter’s throat.

He has no intention of connecting and Peter doesn’t take it as a challenge. Just narrows his eyes, then laughs hoarsely as he steps back. Peter runs a trembling hand through a few curls hanging over his brow, then turns away and stumbles into the living room. He catches himself against an armchair, leans on it for a few seconds, then pushes forward to finally slump face-down over the sofa.

As for Chris, he sinks down against the door and draws his knees up to his chest. He puts his arms across his knees, then bends them up so that he can close them over his head. Under them he takes deep breath after deep breath.

* * *

Chris takes down his first deer not in the preserve, but behind the local high school. It’s not difficult but it’s messy, largely because he overestimates the force he needs to break the deer’s neck and nearly rips off its head.

“Clean kill other than that,” Peter says. He steps delicately clear of the growing pool of blood, then produces a handkerchief and hands it to Chris. “Although most of us prefer to jump on its back to break its spine, or to bite open the arteries. We don’t wrestle it by the antlers. Hamstrings were cut, it wasn’t going anywhere.”

“Wasn’t thinking,” Chris shrugs. He takes the handkerchief but keeps licking at his lips. He’s…more used to what he is now, but the sheer heat of the blood, splashing up into his mouth, made him so woozy he forgot the deer was already down on the ground.

It’s dark and the werewolf glow makes it impossible to read someone’s eyes, but he can tell Peter is narrowing his at him. Then the other man sighs. He looks towards the school, where Derek is reluctantly keeping watch, then takes off his suit-jacket and rolls up his sleeves.

Peter shifts and then squats on the side of the deer away from the flowing blood, near the rump. He grabs the hind legs and twists them up, then extends his claws. He’s about to start cutting in at the rear when Chris stoops over and hooks a claw into what’s left of the deer’s throat, then rips down the belly.

The viscera immediately spill out, still warm enough to steam when Chris runs his hand above them. His mouth waters and he drops his jaw without thinking, fangs coming out, but Peter grabs his wrist. Holds it for a second, while he’s fighting down the urge to just slap the man aside, and then pushes it away.

“Liver smells wrong,” Peter says. He digs carefully around, then pulls that and the stomach aside. “They’ve been spreading poison on some of the salt licks around here. Doesn’t touch the meat or the blood, but you can spend a couple days healing from a bite of these, it builds up so much. Here, smell.”

He jabs all five of the claws on one hand into the liver, then pulls them out and turns them up for Chris to warily sniff at. It’s musky, thick and oily, but at the end there’s a sudden acrid sting that makes Chris rear back, snorting and rubbing at his nose.

Then he remembers. He looks down at the towel, which Peter might as well not have handed over, and then just drops it to the side. Comes back to the deer, where Peter, having cleaned his claws with the help of a hip flask, is now slicing off strips of meat. Peter hands him one and then starts eating the other.

“Mercury cut with wolfsbane, probably,” Chris says.

Peter finishes his strip and settles back, wrists on his knees, bloody hands crooked clear of his trousers. He looks thoughtful and attentive.

“I talked Gerard into not using that. Last thing he ever listened to me about, I think. It kills people’s dogs and cats too. Sometimes little kids, they like to lick their fingers after they touch something.” Chris has had venison before but this tastes as much like that as milk tastes like butter, and it’s not just because he’s eating it raw. He cuts another strip but he’s in too much of a hurry and it comes up a mangled mess.

He’s irritated with himself. He knows how to dress a deer, and he can be a lot more precise with his claws than any knife. That’s the problem, he thinks, flexing his fingers and staring at them. It’s so much easier to cut now that he doesn’t know how to run with the edge.

“Is that how you’re reconciling yourself,” Peter says. It’s not a question.

Chris looks up, then grimaces and slashes at the deer. He peels up pieces that are even more ragged but he cares less and less. “What do you want me to do? I broke with my father because I didn’t agree with what he did, but that doesn’t change what you’ve done. And don’t tell me it was all in kind, or in revenge.”

“It was all _worth it_ , then,” Peter says, leaning over the deer. His voice licks and curls obscenely, and his eyes flare bright with disgust. “You’re a werewolf, Argent. You broke your code, you’re living with that. Don’t tell me things don’t look different.”

“Don’t preach at me. You sound like my father,” Chris snaps. He’s not expecting much so he stiffens when Peter abruptly withdraws. He watches the man, then goes back to eating when Peter does nothing. “I’m the same man I was before, Hale.”

Peter laughs at him. “You’re sitting there and you’re telling me about mercury baiting and you say that. And I think you believe it. You know what Laura’s out doing, don’t you? What I’ll be doing later? Or are you so foolish—”

“They chose to hunt with Gerard,” Chris says curtly. His stomach suddenly lurches and he drops the half-eaten meat. He breathes in carefully and his gut seems to settle. “They’re grown men. They’ve seen what he does. They don’t need saving. I didn’t do a damn thing for them before, did I?”

“You didn’t do a damn thing for anyone,” Peter says. His voice is flat and hard as steel. Then he straightens himself and he smiles, all whimsy and pleasantry. “Well, then, I suppose you won’t mind if we bring a few home to question?”

Chris’ claws snap into the ground and the deer carcass. He growls before he can catch himself. He remembers the bodies they’ve found over the years, the contorted faces, the needless mutilations.

Peter grins at him and Chris snarls louder, then shakes himself. The man’s just baiting—

They go over, Peter’s teeth snapping at his throat, claws sunk deep into Chris’ arm and hip, Chris grabbing instinctively at Peter’s shoulders. Then the impact hits and Chris feels like a bag of rocks has slammed him. He gasps and hunches in, then twists away as that brings him too close to Peter’s jaws. Peter laughs _then_ , laughs and lifts just enough for Chris to twist himself onto his belly, strike out with one arm to wrench out from underneath. Then he drops back down and his teeth sting at the back of Chris’ neck.

Chris snarls and flattens down. The teeth dig in, begin to hurt and a whine squeezes out of his clenching throat. He hates himself for it but he can taste the panic in his mouth and it’s still rising.

Then Peter pushes himself up. He’s still over Chris, barring every way with his arms and legs, but he lifts his head till Chris doesn’t even feel his breath anymore. “You can’t hide your head in the sand anymore, Chris,” Peter says. “You broke with your father but didn’t even try to stop him. Are you going to try and stop us?”

“You can’t kill me,” Chris says. He takes a deep breath through the grass and the dirt, and then deliberately turns over. “You can’t let me break away either. That’d be two strikes against you, and the first one was what got you here.”

Peter’s eyes linger on his throat. The hands on either side of Chris’ head clench hard enough to tunnel up clods of dirt. “He wanted you to shoot yourself in the head.”

“I won’t stop you,” Chris says after a moment. “I’ll even help. But just kill them, Peter. They’re done, you know that. Just kill them.”

The muscle of Peter’s right cheek flexes. His lips part and the tips of his fangs slip out between them. He measures the breadth of Chris’ throat like a cook measuring a chicken’s against the knife stroke, and then he grimaces and turns his head away.

“Cora was leaking black rot from everywhere at the end, you know,” he says softly. “Everywhere. She made us promise—bury her in clean underwear.” He doesn’t look down when Chris flinches. “And my sister, her husband, the rest of my family—the children all had broken necks when they finally pulled out the bodies. And you say it’s done?”

“He doesn’t care,” Chris sighs. That makes Peter look back at him, and murderous again. Chris shrugs, lets his throat and belly show. “You can make it as flashy as you want, paint the town with their guts. He’s not even going to read the papers.”

Peter’s lips thin. Then he jerks himself off Chris. He hunkers down by the deer, then stands up and looks himself over, frowning at the bloodstains on his clothes.

“You’re sharper than you were,” he says. “More ruthless.”

“I’m the same as I was.” Chris rolls over onto his hands and knees, then sits back. “At the end.”

Peter looks over. His lip curls and then he turns away. He beckons peremptorily for Chris to come closer.

“You’re going to waste good meat,” he says. “Come here and help me.”

* * *

When Derek and Laura return, Derek’s mood hasn’t lightened any but he’s moving less like a coiled spring. His temper does lash out again once he’s learned of Stiles’ visit, but he restrains himself to a broken cup and a few accusing looks. Then he retreats to one of the bedrooms—not Stiles’ room—and skips dinner.

“It would’ve been more fun if we hadn’t kept having werewolves come up and ask us which of us was his beta,” Laura says as they eat. Then her brows draw together. She leans back and dips into one of the shopping bags she’d brought home, and then pulls out a manila folder. “We did run into a chatty reporter who pulled this for me.”

She hands it over to Peter, who flips it open and reads it over his meal, then passes it to Chris. Inside are two news clippings, a couple weeks apart. One is a blind item that describes the son of a former, highly respected police captain and how he’s turned to a life of crime and brutality. The other is a retraction of the first article, stating at length how it never meant to implicate a Captain John Stilinski, who died in the line of fire during a botched robbery and who has never been connected with any crimes whatsoever.

“Sounds like he’s dealing with some jealous rivals inside.” Laura takes back the clippings when Chris is done with them. “Can’t be enemies, Capone’s driven everyone out of town.”

“Who?” Peter says, wiping his mouth on a napkin.

Chris gets up, even though his plate is still half-full. “If you’re going to be that stupid, I’m turning in.”

“There’s no harm in _knowing_ , Chris,” Peter calls after him. But neither he nor Laura make any attempt to bring him back.

It’s still early, but Chris beds down in the other guest room. He doesn’t feel particularly sleepy, but he falls asleep with surprising ease, and doesn’t wake up till the early hours of the morning.

The first thing he notices is that he only hears one other heartbeat, and it’s in the same room as him. He uncurls and Derek looks up from the chair where he’s blacking one of his shoes.

“Peter and Laura went to a show, and then went for some drinks,” he says. His socked feet are propped up on the bed and he pushes them further on as he slouches down. “They just called, they’re on their way back. Not going after other packs.”

Chris is still too muzzy with sleep to even feel nervous. He just nods and then crawls off the bed. He washes up and changes his clothes, and then is in the middle of a shave when Derek thumps against the bathroom door.

“Did he say anything about who he wanted you to meet?” Derek asks.

“I told you _exactly_ what he said,” Chris says. He wipes his razor off on a towel, then scrapes it down his left cheek. The edge catches him and he hisses, then flicks the spot of blood off with his finger and keeps going. “It’s not going to be as simple as showing him what you can do.”

“You don’t think I know that?” Derek pushes himself back against the door and glowers at Chris in the mirror. His hands twist in his trouser pockets and his elbows jam into the door panels, making them creak. “You all think I’m just some stupid lovesick kid, well, your sister cured me of that.”

Chris pauses with the razor over his chin. Then he takes it down and cleans it off. He gives the blade a couple strops against the side of the sink, then lifts it again. “She didn’t teach you a damn thing about waiting, I see.”

Derek’s jaw works. Then he grins and tips his chin up, baring his teeth in the family smirk. “Wasn’t exactly her top priority.”

“Then what are you trying to do? Get him to kill you?” Chris snaps, turning around. “You think that’ll make him happy?”

“You know, I don’t—” Then Derek breaks off. He heaves at his shoulders like he means to leave, but instead he just pulls one hand out and starts raking at his hair. His fingers ride over his forehead once, and leave marks that stand out cherry red on his skin for a second. Then they fade, and he looks at Chris in the mirror. “I still don’t get it. Do you think _you’re_ happy like this? You don’t look that crazy.”

Chris stares at him. Then the front door opens, and they hear Peter and Laura coming in. Derek glances over, then snorts and stalks out.

Once Derek is clear of the bedroom door, Chris turns back. He lifts the razor, then grimaces and lowers it. Straightens out where the handle’s rippled over his clenching fingers, and then he finishes shaving.

* * *

The first week aside, it isn’t that hard, being a werewolf. No harder than any of the training Chris had done when he was younger, and certainly makes more sense. Being a hunter from an old, unbroken line means Chris has inherited as much superstition as useful knowledge. Werewolves, on the other hand, are rarely sentimental. If it fails to work, if it is too weak for their needs, they discard it.

Gerard’s men are still plaguing them by the time Chris’ first full moon rolls around, but their numbers are reduced enough for the Hales to decide they can chance the preserve, so long as they stay on the side closest to town. Peter and Laura declare that they will patrol the perimeter of the selected area, while Derek is tasked with keeping on Chris’ heels.

Derek has barely spoken five words to Chris since Chris turned, and he maintains that record, communicating in irritated huffs and growls and snapping jaws well before the moon rises and they shift. But he’s relatively even-tempered otherwise, herding Chris with shoulder charges and claw-less slaps of the hand where Peter or even Laura would slash out.

The moon—it feels like the first time Chris got drunk, doubled up with his first hangover. It exhilarates as much as it hurts. He doesn’t seem to have any sense of up or down, right or wrong. The world has no boundaries and the disorientation makes him sick, even as he’s throwing himself into it, flinging his body over streams and into trees just because he _can_ , tearing up earth and wood and anything else in his way. He dances around a stiff, silent Derek, then lunges at the other werewolf.

He doesn’t recall much of the fight, just that he wasn’t nearly as overmatched as with Peter. Derek keeps trying to pin him, doesn’t just dig down and _hurt_ , that’s the difference. Chris isn’t in the mood for it, can’t see why anybody would be, goes at Derek like he means it because he _does_.

Then he hears something.

Chris looks up and through the fever he sees a man’s silhouette with something long and thin jutting from it. _Rifle_ and it’s like someone’s dunked him in cold water and he remembers and he _remembers_. Hunting, his father showing him how the barrel snaps down, the chill off the water as Stiles pushes him down, blood dripping from his hands as the dying wolf wrenches back to manlike.

He throws Derek off him, launches himself up the nearest tree. When the man throws the flare at him, Chris already has his eyes slitted against the glare. He catches the non-burning end and throws it back in the man’s face, then lands on his back amid screaming. The rifle clatters to the ground and Chris snaps the man’s spine with his weight. Then he grabs for the knife at the man’s hip and pulls it out. Slashes down just as Derek comes over the hill.

“ _Laura_. Peter,” Derek says, looking at the blood gurgling from the man’s throat. “Fuck—”

“Circle back behind where he came from, he’s just a scout but there’s always two more within sight range. They’ll have seen the flare,” Chris says. He paws through the man’s clothes, then sighs in relief as he spots the Argent crest on a pocketbook in a coat pocket. He hadn’t recognized the man’s face and they can’t deal with another hunter family right now.

Then he realizes Derek hasn’t moved. Chris looks up to snarl why is he waiting and Derek snorts, looking amused. He looks very like his uncle that way.

“That’s what anchors you,” Derek says.

Chris looks down at the hunter. The light’s just fading from his eyes. One of his hands has fallen near the knife Chris dropped. It twitches once, then goes slack.

“I’m a hunter,” Chris says, looking back up at Derek. Then he turns back to the dead man. The rifle was up, Chris thinks, and he shakes his head. Pushes the corpse to the side and starts digging a hole. “It’s what I know.”

“Just a different target?” Derek says. He takes a step away but he makes sure he doesn’t give Chris his back.

Chris sinks his fingers into the ground up to the knuckles. He stops and the moonlight on him sends a sharp, mad prickle through his bones, but it’s bearable now. He’s killed men before, he remembers. 

“That depends,” he mutters. “Go find your family, Derek.”

Derek watches him for another second, then turns. Scoops up the hunter’s rifle and casually swings it into a tree trunk, breaking it. He drops the pieces and lopes off. Chris feels a snarl rise but keeps it tucked into his throat, and just digs.

* * *

Exactly five minutes after Derek and Laura leave for the movie theater down the block, Stiles shows up. He smells faintly of Derek, and the smudge of lipstick on his jaw is the same shade Laura was wearing, and wears both those traces like weapons.

Peter puts down the book he’d been skimming through, and then, when Stiles walks past Chris, gets to his feet with a start. He hesitates, then inclines his head forward and to the side. Stiles grabs him by the back of the neck and Chris can see Peter’s knee buckle before he catches himself. He’s unusually awkward about it, doing it without his hands, which are in fists at his sides, or leaning unduly on Stiles.

“Huh,” Stiles says, pulling Peter’s head over his shoulder. He buries his nose deep in the crook of Peter’s neck and sniffs, then leans back before it could be called a real scenting. “ _And_ you two? Really?”

“Pack shares,” Chris says dryly. He steps up behind an armchair and then folds his arms across its top so he can hide his fists in his sleeves.

Stiles laughs. Rubs his hand up and down the back of Peter’s neck, then works it around so he’s holding Peter under the chin. “Teaching him all your tricks, I see,” he says to Peter. “Real family project.”

“He didn’t want to die,” Peter says, shrugging. He’s forcing his shoulders back and they’re trembling with the effort.

“Much to my irritation. But then, not one damned thing in that town ever went like I wanted it to,” Stiles mutters. Then he cocks his head. His grip on Peter’s jaw loosens and he turns his head from side to side, watching the flesh under his fingers slowly gain back its color. Then his thumb slips down, passes back and forth over the side of Peter’s throat. “Derek kisses pretty good. Did you teach him that too, or was that Kate Argent?”

Chris sucks in his breath, but stills at a look from Peter. “Neither of us had that honor,” Peter says, picking his words like he’s picking them out of broken glass. “He had a girlfriend before that.”

Stiles’ brows rise. He pulls Peter a little closer, so he’s breathing at Peter’s stretched throat. “How about I watch Chris fuck you, and then I run my hands through your hair again, and then you all get back on the train and leave me alone?”

Peter makes a thick, strangled noise and Stiles abruptly twists his face into Peter’s throat. Chris glimpses teeth and he’s thrown the armchair aside before he realizes; Stiles jerks back, then snorts and yanks Peter to the side, releasing him so he falls into another armchair. There’s no blood, not even any spit on Peter’s neck.

“You _miss_ me,” Stiles snaps. He circles Peter, claws out, eyes blazing red, and then jerks away with a slash at the empty air. “You sneak up here, you manage that without sending up a fucking warning shot, I don’t just fucking kill you on sight for being a fucking surprise, and Derek fucking says he _misses_ me. You fucking let me fuck you around—”

“Stiles,” Peter says. He puts out his hand, then withdraws it. Then he slowly sinks down next to the chair; he’d been half-doubled over it anyway so he doesn’t have far to go. He runs his hand halfway through his hair, then just presses it to his temple, looking weary. “Stiles. You’ve won. You won, Stiles.”

“I didn’t want _you_ ,” Stiles says.

Peter closes his eyes. “You wanted Scott. I know.”

He leans his head against the chair. Behind him, Stiles stares at the back of his head as if that alone would set it afire. Then Stiles’ head shoots up and he pins Chris with the same look.

“Going to reason with my better nature?” he says bitterly.

“You don’t have one,” Chris says. He takes a slow step forward, hesitating when it looks as if Stiles might bolt for the door, and then takes another one. He’s between Stiles and the door at that point, not that that would stop the other man if he really tried. “Not asking you to kill any of us either.”

Stiles snorts. “Well, that would get old fast,” he mutters. He fumbles in his pocket, then pulls out a cigarette and his lighter. “Then what?”

“To…to help,” Chris says.

For a moment Stiles stares at him. Then he snorts again. He plucks the cigarette, which has been held in the flame so long it’s got a small flame of its own, out of his mouth. Blows the tip till it’s only glowing red, then smokes furiously so the whole thing ashes in a matter of seconds. Then he pulls out another cigarette.

This one, he smokes a little slower, but it’s still half-gone by the time he looks up at Chris. “Seriously.”

“Scott did his damnedest to keep you out of it, even though he couldn’t stand to live with you,” Chris says. From the corner of his eye he can see Peter’s head whipping up. He hears the spike in Peter’s heartbeat before the man even tenses to hiss at him. “Neither of you chose it but you were his alpha anyway, and he never forgot that, up till the day he died. And if he couldn’t, I don’t see how you can expect us to.”

Stiles goes white. He’s perfectly still, only the line of ash on his cigarette moving. His eyes are blank—blank and human, which is the most unnerving thing about him. He’s been angry with them, but this is different. Chris knows full well he’s looking at true rage in the other man, and there isn’t a speck of werewolf in it.

Then, like he’s swimming through molasses, he takes the cigarette from his mouth. He crushes the tip out with his fingers and flicks the butt onto the coffee table.

“Why can’t I kill you,” he says flatly. He doesn’t ask.

“Nobody’s saying we deserve you,” Chris says. He has to raise his voice over Peter’s warning hiss. “Nobody’s saying you deserve _us_. But that’s not how it works and you know that.”

Stiles snarls at him. Chris’ knees thump on the floor and his head goes back, and then he manages to control himself enough to not whine. He bites his lip instead, watching Stiles stalk back and forth before him and Peter. Then Stiles pivots on his heel and storms up to that one door they haven’t been able to open. Of course it opens for him, and he sends the door bashing into the wall as he goes into the room.

“Chris,” Peter says. He rubs his shaking hands against his thighs. “You realize that was _insane_.”

“Runs in the family,” Chris mutters, though he’s catching the breath he didn’t realize he’d been skipping.

Peter makes a small, incredulous noise. He shakes his head, then abruptly pulls himself over, crawling on his hands and knees till he’s in front of Chris. He looks expectantly and Chris grimaces, tries to just wrap his arms around himself. Except his breathing doesn’t get under control, and he’s going to pass out if he keeps up gasping like he is.

He resists another second, then gives in and buries his face in Peter’s shoulder. The other man curls around him, rubbing his cheek over Chris’ back and arm, making a low rippling noise. Except for that he doesn’t touch Chris, keeping his hands plastered to his own knees.

“You hate each other,” Stiles says, very calmly, and they jerk apart. He’s holding a set of keys in his hand, and the door behind him is shut again. He starts to say something, stops himself, and then just walks across the room to the hallway door. “Well, come on. Yes, both of you, get going or I’ll lock you in.”

Peter is on his feet in an instant. He swings his hand back and half-drags up Chris, who was already in the process of standing. His mouth twitches as Chris shakes him off and he falls back so Chris can follow Stiles out ahead of him.

* * *

They keep knocking Chris over. Barging a shoulder into him when they pass him in the hall. Clipping his heels as they follow him around town, as much to make sure he won’t run off as to make sure his newfound control isn’t just a passing aberration. An outright shove of the hand when he’s got too far ahead, or is standing in their way, or just is close enough for it.

His temper is shorter now. He’d never been much of a shouter, or even a talker, leaving that to the others in his family, but since he’d been bitten he finds himself choking down hisses, snarls, howls. He learns to hear them coming, to smell the shift of their moods, and still, they keep getting at him.

Derek slaps him aside when a simple request would have done, and Chris pivots and jams him up against the wall with a double fistful of clothing. The man’s back barely touches the wall before Laura’s flung Chris across the room, shattering a table and breaking two of his fingers. He can heal immediately but the memory of the ache lingers for a few hours. The memory of his pride suddenly springing back to life, only to fall to shreds, stays even longer.

Laura rolls him off a fresh-killed boar, then swipes her claws across his chest for good measure. He kicks her feet out from under her and then Peter charges into him from the side, trips him into a muddy ravine. The sides are too steep for him to climb, even with claws and superhuman strength, and when he tries to jump out, Peter swats him back down without so much as a huff of effort. Peter spends half an hour circling the sides of the ravine, rumbling his amusement and toying with Chris like that, before Laura grudgingly calls him to eat. By the time Chris heaves himself over the edge, the boar is gone and the night’s nearly over. He has to settle for a bloodless, limp sandwich back at the penthouse.

Peter nudges and trips and startles Chris to madness when the others aren’t around, and when they are, he brazenly crowds right up to Chris, so either Chris falls back or falls off his feet. Chris falls back, and then he swivels about behind the other man, with a car between them and the other two. He gets in a two-claw cut at Peter’s shoulderblade before Derek comes leaping over the top of the car, forcing him out where Laura can rake him over the hard pavement.

They’re all wary of each other after that. Chris doesn’t sleep in that utility room anymore, but he doesn’t belong in any of the bedrooms either. He doesn’t sleep much, period, but he does need it once in a while and he can’t go far from them.

He tries the couch a few times, then the roof. There’s a landscaped patio on it, with grass beds almost as lush as the fields around the preserve. They’re comfortable enough for a quick nap but beyond that he always wakes with a crick in his neck and aches in his back.

One night he’s too tired for it, and he abandons the roof to head back inside. He thinks he’ll just pile up some cushions in the corner and be done with it, except as soon as he steps over the soundproofing runes, he hears snarling _challenge-challenge-challenge_.

Instinct rushes him inside. The living room is wrecked, furniture strewn everywhere, one lamp shattered amid a scorched circle on the carpet. Peter prowls about the fluttering remains of a book, while across the room, Derek spits out bloody froth and a broken tooth, crouching over the shards of a vase. Laura’s nowhere to be seen.

Peter moves towards his nephew. Chris doesn’t mean to, doesn’t even think, just inhales, and suddenly Peter’s head whips around. He shifts his face back to twisted, angry human, his eyes violently blue, and then he leaps at Chris.

Chris dodges. He’s slow, Peter catches his arm, and then a piece of a table-top rolls under his foot. They go over and he thinks _stay on top_ and he scrabbles at Peter’s back and arms, twisting and scratching to keep his neck away from the other man. Something comes at his face and he yanks his head down, then swears as he glimpses Peter’s jubilant laughing face.

Peter’s teeth drop towards him and his arms are pinned, he can’t move out of the way. _Lie-down-bare-throat_ pounds through his head and it hurts and he’s _tired_ and maybe that’s why he smashes his head forward instead, thinking with the pain and not with the insistent voices in his mind.

He tears his forehead open on Peter’s fangs but the other man reels over and off of him, sputtering and spitting. Chris wrenches himself free, flips over and then hears another body coming at him. His hands slide on splintered wood, getting punctured and bloodied, and then he grabs a broken table leg and twists. Sense memory—older memory than the beast in his head—has him angling the end of the leg like a knife instead of a bludgeon. He thinks it _is_ a knife, in his fight-fevered mind. He always carried one, always went for it when he had nothing else.

The leg isn’t sharp enough to get through Derek’s ribs but it snaps a couple of them, leaves a bloody gash down his side as he topples over. He falls onto Chris’ legs, snarling, and Chris kicks him off. Derek goes rolling over, then slumps against Peter’s arms as Peter hunches over him, growling angrily at Chris.

It snaps the fever, like the haze was just so much gauze in front of Chris’ eyes and now that’s been rent away. He stares at the two of them, Derek heaving himself over so he and his uncle are lined up together and against Chris. Then he snorts. It’s thick, he has something in his throat, and he works his shoulders to cough out the bloody mucus because, as frustrated as he is, he knows not to take his eyes off them.

“Shut up,” he mutters. He wipes the back of his mouth with his hand. “Just—shut up. It’s late, take it outside. Whatever it is.”

“None of your business.” Derek pushes himself up on one arm, grunting in pain. He reaches back and touches his side, then winces. “Damn it, Argent, did you have to break everything?”

Chris laughs roughly. “Looked more like Peter from here.”

Derek looks at him, lips starting to curl back into a snarl. But then Peter, as amused as he looks bloodyminded, puts his hand on Derek’s back. It’s close enough to the ribs that Derek hisses, even though he has to be half-healed by now.

Peter glances down, then settles back on his haunches. He lowers himself slowly so his head is just over Derek’s side; Derek stiffens as soon as he realizes, twisting to stare at Peter over his shoulder. His claws flex, then still, as Peter starts to make a soft, placating noise, _pack-no-threat_.

He breathes in sharply as Peter bends his head, licks into the torn side of Derek’s shirt. Derek glances back at Chris, snorts, and then abruptly twists himself over, offering his side up as Peter nuzzles closer. Both his hands wrap around Peter’s arm, and then one lets go to reach farther and curl around Peter’s hip. Peter purrs louder, more languidly, and rubs his face up over Derek’s shoulder and then drapes himself over the other man as they kiss.

Chris exhales roughly. Gets up, brushes some wood fragments and rags of carpet off his trousers. His palms still sting and he rubs them harder against his thighs, trying to help his healing push out the splinters. He looks around and finally heads for the kitchen.

There’s no way he’s getting any more sleep so he makes coffee. He’s debating how much whiskey to add to it when he senses Peter in the doorway.

“It wasn’t what you think,” Peter says.

“I _don’t_ think about it,” Chris says, and goes for half and half.

Peter sighs and comes into the kitchen, right up behind Chris. He’s far enough away so that it’s not a clear threat but it still makes Chris’ shoulders tense. “It doesn’t bother you,” he says, and for a moment he sounds almost envious. “The lack of certainty. The constant—shifting. We’re falling apart over the pits of hell and you just hide away.”

“I’m too tired to try and sort out what you mean.” Chris turns around, lifts the mug pointedly at Peter.

“That’s not the one with wolfsbane,” Peter says. He smiles maliciously when Chris jerks the mug down. Then he takes another step towards Chris and the malice wipes clean, to be replaced by a frowning, confused kind of curiosity. He cocks his head at Chris. “You don’t know. You don’t understand.”

Chris just keeps himself from throwing the coffee in the other man’s face. “Well, I’m new.”

“There’s no alpha,” Peter says. He pauses, then laughs. It’s strained and bitter and his heartbeat goes into a spastic, almost hysterical buzz for a second. “There’s _no alpha_. You’re a damned hunter, you should know—there’s no center, there’s no sense. Any day any of us could be strongest, and we spend all our time watching that, trying to see who it’ll be, weighing each other up—”

“You’ve been doing that back there to each other this whole time?” Chris says, staring. He swings his arm behind him and puts the mug down. It clatters loudly but he doesn’t look to see if it’s spilled. “Don’t look at me like that, none of you will let me—”

“Did you want us to take out an ad in the paper?” Peter hisses.

He shoves Chris and Chris sees it coming from a mile away, it’s so wild. Chris puts his arms up to block and Peter snarls at him and then they’re tangling again. Except Peter’s unbalanced, careless, and it’s almost nothing this time when Chris twists behind him, traps him up against the counter. He twists Peter’s arms behind his back and his teeth are in Peter’s nape and Peter seizes up. Then shudders, whines. Begs with the tilt of his head, the press of his ass, the arch of his shoulders.

And Chris gets it, then. He gets it, but he’s too far in himself, drunk on the yielding body before him. He rubs into Peter, gasping till his teeth slip out of Peter’s flesh, but Peter’s gotten his hands free, is too busy tearing at their trousers to care. Peter grabs Chris’ hand and pulls it around to his cock, and bends over.

They fuck quickly, ungracefully, leaving chips of the counter scattered across the floor and gashes all over the cabinets. Peter takes Chris’ cock with a desperate whimper, his head lolling, his hands clenching on Chris’ hips, and then shoves it out when he’s done and when Chris isn’t quite, so Chris comes on the sag of the man’s trousers under his ass instead of inside him. Disappointment drags a snarl from Chris and Peter twists around, misses biting a chunk out of Chris’ shoulder by a hair.

Chris staggers to the other side of the kitchen, well clear. He grabs at the wall, then slumps against it, watching Peter pant.

“Where’s Laura?” he finally asks.

Peter closes his eyes. “Out.” He gestures vaguely in the direction of the preserve, then rubs at his face. “It’s…she _was_ alpha. Different for her. She—knows, get out, just run it off. It’s not going to last long, you know.”

“I was feeling it,” Chris says slowly. “Am feeling. I just…didn’t have the words.”

“We’re going to kill each other,” Peter says. He sounds calm, almost philosophical. Then he lifts his hand to push the hair from his face and his fingers are trembling so badly he nearly scratches his eye. “I thought I could live with that. Painful, yes, but—it happens sometimes. Packs tear apart. But—like this, like this, when we _know_. When we’ve gotten to know h—”

“Just stop fighting.” Chris almost rolls his eyes at the look Peter gives him, it’s so…childishly disgusted. “Shut up, stop it. We’re stuck here till we can get a chance to go, and that’s not going to come if we’re ripping each other up. You know that.”

“And that’s what you have to say?” Peter says.

“Someone was going to,” Chris says. He pushes himself up the wall, then gingerly steps away from it. His knees hold and he takes another step. Towards Peter, whose brows rise and arms and legs tense, but who leans back to watch. “If it’s me, fine. You all want to tear me up anyway.”

He goes to pass Peter, but the other man puts his arm out. Then hooks his fingers into Chris’ sleeve. It’s loose but Chris stops.

“But we can’t do that.” Peter’s almost gentle, the way he speaks and looks at Chris. “You know that. You know why.”

Chris doesn’t think that needs a reply. He pushes forward again and this time Peter puts his palm out flat to catch against Chris’ chest. For a moment that unthinking anger surges up and Chris grabs Peter’s wrist, pulls it away and out. Peter ducks at him and Chris curses, barely gets his other hand up to take the other man by the throat—

But it’s not biting at him Peter wants. The man ducks lower, twists his mouth away so only his forehead presses against Chris’ neck. He’s crooning, a guttural sound Chris senses as much as hears, _come-come-hurts-ease_ , and something in Chris twists up.

He lets go of Peter, then wraps his hands over the back of the man’s neck. He knows, rationally, that Peter means something else by it. At least a couple other things, but he does hurt, and he is angry, and for a moment, as long as Peter keeps his head down and makes that sound and leans warmly into him, it’s not so bad.

* * *

Stiles drives Peter and Chris across town and to Resurrection Cemetery, on the very outskirts of the city. It’s closed for the night, but one of the keys on Stiles’ ring opens a back gate. They leave the gate and go in on foot, till they’ve reached a squat, plain mausoleum. Another key unlocks its door.

The mausoleum is completely filled inside with four large coffins. “The Alpha pack,” Stiles says. “Well, most of them. Ennis there, he bit me, and then he was so damn shocked when the first thing I did after turning was kill him. It was like he’d never seen a werewolf use a gun before.”

Peter and Chris look at each other. Then Peter steps up onto the front step of the mausoleum next to Stiles. He’s going to ask a question when Stiles dips his head and a flame flickers to life.

They’re heavy coffins, Chris notes. The wood is plain but it looks thick, and three wide steel bands clamp around each one.

“That asshole killed my father,” Stiles adds. He puffs on his cigarette for a few seconds. Then he pulls it out and looks curiously at it, as if he’d never seen it before. “Dad was…he was tearing his hair out, trying to figure out who was killing all the people. He knew it wasn’t just a pack of wild dogs, or an escaped tiger, but he couldn’t figure it out. He’d quit smoking when my mom got sick, but he took it up again in the last couple weeks. This is his brand, only one he ever used. Now that Scott’s dead it’s about as close to an anchor as I’ll get.”

“Did you know about werewolves back then?” Chris asks.

Stiles sticks the cigarette back in his mouth and finishes it off. “Yeah. I didn’t tell him because I thought I could handle it for him. And I didn’t, and he died, and Scott almost died. I swore after that, nobody else. Nobody else was going to die on me.”

“You can’t swear something like that,” Peter says. He pauses when Stiles looks at him, then steps off the mausoleum porch so he’s looking up at Stiles. “You’re an alpha, Stiles, you take care of your pack so they can fight for you, and sometimes they will die for you.”

“Is that what you’re saying Scott did?” Stiles snaps.

Peter spreads his hands, lifts his chin even more. “No. No, listen, I have no idea what Scott—I cannot say this enough, we didn’t _know_ what he wanted. We weren’t talking. And that was our fault, I know—”

“He didn’t talk to you either. Didn’t talk to me, not when it mattered.” Then Stiles turns, sharp as his voice. He shuts and locks the door, and then leans against it, looking at them. “I meant it, you know, when I said I understood why you did what you did. It’s just he died, and you didn’t.”

“I know. If I’d been in your place…” Peter smiles bitterly “…well, I won’t pretend to be what I am not. But if I was asked what a good alpha should do in that situation, Stiles, you would be the blueprint. Derek—he’s young. He doesn’t quite understand, but Laura and I do. And I think…”

He looks at Chris, who doesn’t take it for anything but the favor on a string it is but who doesn’t leave it lying loose either. “I got a lot of people killed so Allison could have a childhood,” Chris says. “We’re not any good on our own. We weren’t even before you came to town. But we could be—you could get some use out of us.”

“You don’t even have to touch us,” Peter says softly. “Oh, I know, and I can’t help but want, Stiles. It’s how I am. But you’re our alpha, even if we’re not your pack. You can do what you want.”

“So you _say_ , but here we are.” Stiles shoulders by Peter, then past Chris. He goes down the path a few yards and then stops, staring at a tombstone.

He smokes a third cigarette, then gives himself a sharp shake. Then he looks back over his shoulder at them. It’s a clear follow-me signal and he doesn’t look back again till they’re all in the car, and even then, it’s only to see that his rear bumper clears a bush spilling over the curb.

They drive back into Chicago in silence. Stiles pulls up to the hotel, then turns around.

“I keep asking myself why I would even want a pack,” he says abruptly. “Scott went back to Beacon Hills and I managed to not die. I missed him like hell, but I kept going. I’m _still_ going, gangland wars and all.”

“You don’t need one,” Chris says, when Peter doesn’t.

Stiles looks at them, his face unreadable. “Get out,” he says.

They get out of the car and go into the hotel. Instead of leading them to the elevator, Stiles goes through what appears to be the laundry floor and then up a flight of stairs, emerging in a quiet corner of the lobby. He goes up to the main foyer and leans against one of the massive, gilt-encrusted marble columns that lines its edges.

“I figured you’d show up sooner or later,” he mutters, when they’ve come up to him. His fingers grope towards the pocket with the cigarettes, then drop away. Across the lobby, Derek and Laura are just walking in; they spot Stiles immediately and start over. “And I _thought_ I’d know how you’d handle it. I thought Deucalion had a twisted mind, but you really know how to drive me around the bend. You stay any longer and I’m just going to start ripping up people in public.”

“Do you want us to leave?” Peter asks.

Derek jerks forward and only Laura’s hand clamping down on his shoulder stops him from bolting the rest of the way.

Stiles opens his mouth, then sucks in a breath. He makes a choked, sticking sound at the end of it, and then forces out a short, vicious laugh. He shakes his head, then turns on them like he’s going to shout. “I—”

He goes stiff, his eyes shooting past Peter towards the lobby doors, where three men in long coats have just walked in. Then he lunges forward. Goes barreling straight into a chair, and when that knocks over, he keeps going so the chair ricochets off his floor and goes skidding across the lobby, scattering the three men.

Amid the clatter the other people in the lobby don’t notice the sharp, urgent bark Stiles lets out—but the werewolves do. Derek and Laura cut right, towards the reception area, where there’s a stack of traveling chests piled up. Peter disappears to the left, while Chris throws himself behind a half-wall of marble just as bullets rake across the columns where they’d been standing.

He loses sight of Stiles and the shattering marble makes it hard to hear. He can tell where the bullets are coming from, and that people are screaming, but little else.

Chris curses to himself, then starts crawling along the half-wall. It’s only a few yards long and there’s a large potted urn at the end of it; he grabs the tree in it as he rounds the urn. One of the gunmen is advancing across the lobby, just a few feet away; Chris whips the plant at him and he goes over with a shout and a wet thunk. The tommy gun he’s wielding goes over with him, and sends a fusillade into the ceiling before Chris gets over and wrestles it out of his grip.

The man looks unconscious, at the least, but Chris gives him a surreptitious kick in the head as he turns around. Another gunman is face-down across the lobby in a pool of blood, with Derek standing over him and holding a bloodied briefcase; a shocked man in a suit is gaping at him, hand still curled for the briefcase handle.

“Out front!” Laura shouts.

Chris spins around and just sees Stiles’ back as the other man slams through the front doors, toting a tommy gun. He runs after him and gets to the sidewalk just in time to see Stiles riddling a fleeing car with bullets. The car skews into the curb, jumps it, and then smashes into a street lamp.

“Those _bastards_ ,” Stiles pants. He lowers the tommy gun, then grimaces and tosses it aside. Then he goes stiff again, staring glassy-eyed at the car.

A second later, he’s storming back into the hotel lobby. He looks around once, then curses and runs back outside. Derek and Laura follow him.

“Peter?” Chris says.

“Chased one into the elevator,” Derek says. Then he yelps because Stiles is grabbing his shirt.

“ _Which_ elevator?” Stiles says.

Derek blinks at him. “I—left. Second from left, why—”

Stiles snarls and they all freeze because they’re standing on the public sidewalk and Stiles’ eyes are red and he’s dangerously near to shifting. Then he lets Derek go. He shoves Laura out of the way and—races down the block to the neighboring building, an older-looking apartment complex.

They can’t but follow him into it. The building has a lobby but no one’s staffing it at this hour. Stiles breezes by the counter anyway, heading for the stairwell. He slams up the steps for five straight flights, then barges out onto the floor and down the hall. Breaks through the fifth door and charges over it without missing a step.

The apartment beyond is empty. Its windows open right onto one of the hotel’s upper courtyards and Chris starts to understand. Stiles takes the time to rip up the window sash instead of just flinging himself through it, then leaps out and across most of the courtyard before he lands.

Since the window is too narrow for more than one of them at a time, they slow down, but Chris is first after Stiles. He scrambles after the other man, then almost loses him because he’s not expecting Stiles to pull up so quickly.

They’re standing in front of a conference room on the adjacent side of the hotel. The elevator is just down the hall and there’s a trail of blood across the floor from it into the conference room, whose door is swinging wide open. The blood keeps going till it hits one of the windows, which overlooks the roof of the next building.

“What—where—” Derek catches up to them. He looks things over and then snarls. “Peter—”

“How many bodies are in the elevator?” Stiles says. He’s calm again, although a little breathless.

Derek whirls on him so Chris has to grab the man, and even then, Derek’s shoving up against Chris. “What the hell is going on?” he says. “Can’t you just kill us instead of fucking around?”

“I didn’t,” Stiles says, and then he turns around. And Derek sees what Chris and Peter had seen earlier: absolute fury, and not a hint of snarl or blood eyes or fang to dress it up as a fairytale. Stiles gestures at the blood. “Do this. How many bodies?”

Laura goes. It only takes her a few seconds. “Three. Lot of bullet holes, but I don’t smell wolfsbane. Strychnine, maybe. It’s smoking in there, hard to smell.”

Stiles considers that, then starts digging around in his pockets. He pulls out the ring of keys. “This goes to the room you can’t get into,” he says, holding up one key. “One of you stay, get in there, pack it all up and then take it to that building we just went into. Stay away from the stairs and the elevators. Use the windows, go in from the roof, you need to get into the top floor anyway. Use this key—” he holds up another one “—to get in. You won’t get past the hallway but that’s fine, it’s warded. Sit there and wait.”

“Derek,” Laura immediately says. When he opens his mouth to protest, she turns and snarls at him. “Don’t argue. If Peter’s drugged he goes after anybody.”

“I _need_ those things,” Stiles adds. He grabs Derek by the arm, yanks them so close that he nearly cracks their heads together. “I’ll be back in a couple hours. Dawn, tops. And when I get back I’ll need them. Got it?”

“Yes,” Derek mutters. He doesn’t like it but he grabs the keys and then lopes off.

Stiles looks at Laura and Chris, then jerks his head towards the other elevator. “Well, come on,” he says, and they follow him.

* * *

Chris sees more squabbling between the Hales but it seems less intense. They bait him less as well, and he has more attention for figuring out where they are, at least in business terms. That dead hunter aside, Chris is kept firmly out of the work clearing out the last of Gerard’s men. Occasionally Peter or Laura will ask him for information, or for some insight on a hunter tactic, but they don’t let him know who’s been killed or even how many, and the local journalists aren’t so enterprising as to sniff out the bodies. If Chris walked around the preserve for long enough, he could probably figure it out for himself, but he doesn’t.

Anyway, he has enough to do putting the bootlegging back into order. Neither the Hales nor Gerard had been watching the clock for the last couple months, and by the time Laura lets him look at the accounts, the Hales are deep enough in arrears that any other pack would have long since gotten a visitor from the Commission.

Chris guesses that it was waiting to see who came out the winner, but as the weeks drag on and no one comes, he has to raise it with someone.

Peter and Derek are out; they’ve taken on the bulk of the patrols. No one will say it but Laura is clearly still feeling the effects of the wounds Gerard had inflicted on her. Sometimes, when she and Peter are arguing, Derek will slip up beside her and watch Peter’s hands.

“I see your point, but what are we supposed to do about it?” she asks Chris. “Remind them that they should be upset with us?”

“If they needed reminders about that sort of thing, the gun factories wouldn’t be doing the business they are.” Chris steps into the office, then takes a seat across from her, without the desk between them. “What do your reserves look like? Could they make up the difference?”

Laura’s brows draw together. She leans back in her chair and folds her hands over her belly. Puts her foot down and rocks herself from side to side, keeping an eye on Chris. “Why should I tell you?” she says. Then she holds up one hand. “It’s one thing to help wipe out your father’s men. You owed that anyway, if you have any kind of conscience. It’s another to convince us that you give a damn about us.”

“I don’t have to convince you of that,” Chris says. “Neither of us give a damn. What you need to understand is this isn’t just a personal vendetta, Laura. If the Commission has a problem with you, they go after everyone you have. And do you think they’ll care that Stiles hates us? Chicago’s a lot easier to get to than here.”

Her lips thin, but she shakes her head. “Stiles obviously can handle himself.”

“Stiles could whistle and we’d all go running up to him,” Chris snaps. “Even you. And if that’s what you’re hoping for, that he’ll need you so badly, well, I thought you were the reasonable one in the family.”

Laura’s arm jerks out to the side, her palm slapping against the desk. Her eyes flash blue. Every muscle in her body is tensed to the point of snapping.

Then she takes a deep breath, and wills herself to relax. “I talked Peter and Derek out of that last week, so you’re a little late,” she says. Her brows rise and she pulls her hand from the desk and flaps it derisively at him. “And what do you think you’re doing, turning yourself into the perfect beta? Are we supposed to believe that?”

“Believe what you like,” Chris finally says. He thinks about getting up, but then he just slumps down over his knees, rubbing his hands over his face.

For a few minutes neither of them move. Then Laura gets up and pulls open one of the desk drawers. Chris smells alcohol—gin, heavy on the citrus peel, with the rough sting of wolfsbane tincture at the end—and then, oddly, tobacco.

He looks up and Laura hands him a glass, then holds hers while toying with a cigarette. “I didn’t want to fuck him at all,” she says, looking at it. “But…I could see what Derek and Peter saw, you know, with the mouth and the outright ballsiness and the…even when you don’t know what he is, you get the feeling that you’re playing with lit matches, don’t you? It doesn’t make any sense, he looks like Derek could break him in two with a huff and a puff, but when he looks right at you, you don’t doubt it.”

“I knew he was wrong inside from the start,” Chris says. He jiggles his glass, then sniffs at it. Gin never was his drink, even when he enjoyed it, but he takes a mechanical sip when Laura takes one. “I just didn’t care that much. Figured he’d finish me off, and then he started talking to me.”

Derek and Peter have quizzed him to death about what happened in his basement, and he figures most of it’s been passed onto Laura. She confirms it when she doesn’t even bother to pretend to be curious.

Instead she puts the cigarette back into the draw, and then leans forward on her knees so their glasses are almost kissing rims. “He bit you, and we want him, but that doesn’t mean anything between us,” she says, gesturing between them with her free hand. “So why are you acting like pack?”

“Because…I think you are.” Chris looks at her, then acknowledges her expression with a black chuckle. “Find someone else if you want a lie, I think Stiles drowned it out of me. I don’t like it either. I lost my family because of you—don’t say, they did it to themselves. I still _lost_ them, you understand? If you didn’t exist, they’d still be alive. And now I have you, of all people, and…you’re what I have.”

Laura’s face tightens, but she waits till he’s done, and then she just drinks off the rest of her gin. She turns her head as she puts the glass aside, then holds the pose for a second. Then she grimaces and looks back at him. “That still doesn’t make you a werewolf. You can shift and howl at the moon and do everything we do, but that doesn’t have to mean anything.”

“No. No, but I’m…” Chris closes his eyes for a moment, then rumples his hand up the side of his face “…I thought about it. Stiles left me that gun to shoot myself with and I thought about it. And I didn’t pull the trigger. I knew what that’d mean, and I don’t see the point in dwelling on it now.”

He doesn’t want the gin. Chris goes to put the glass aside, only to have Laura wrap her fingers around his wrist. He pauses and she pulls his arm down, so the glass lands safely on the desk, and then forward, towards her. 

They come close enough to each other that they both have to straighten up, or else bump heads. Laura lifts her other hand and cups either side of Chris’ face. She tips his head slightly, not to bare throat, but just so she can get a better look at him. He’d raised his hands to grip her forearms but he loosens his hold after the first few seconds. Lets his hands slide to her elbows.

“I was never the right alpha,” she says, looking at him.

Then she leans towards him. Her mouth comes nowhere near his; she lays her head on his shoulder, then turns it so she’s facing his throat. The flick of her lashes against his skin feels more intimate than if she’d kissed him and he hates her for a moment, for reminding him that that hadn’t drowned or been lost in the bite.

They have sex on her desk. She straddles him, her skirts hiked up, her hands pinning his hands over his head. He hasn’t fucked a woman since his wife—nobody save for his frantic, vicious ruts with Peter, not since Stiles fucked him in that bathroom, and finished fucking his head to the point where he can’t just die quietly, with dignity—and he comes too quickly. He’d be embarrassed if he cared, or if Laura seemed to care, but she just settles on him, his cock nestled deep inside of her. She rolls her hips till he’s hard again, and then slowly, carefully draws them both to climax.

Her claws tear at his wrists, so the blood sticks them to the desk even when she pulls her hands down. She gets off of him, then sits on her hip next to him, still breathing hard.

“I don’t know if we have enough,” she says suddenly. “We have payoffs to make. Sheriff’s getting expensive, making noises about the feds bothering him.”

“Well, I’m dead and the insurance award’s sizable,” Chris says. When she looks at him, he shrugs and then pushes himself up on his arms. He absently scrapes the blood off his hands. “My father put in for it before he died—must have done it as soon as he saw the ringer Stiles left for him to find. If we found a body, we could claim my father’s award, too. Arson works for both policies.”

Laura nods slowly. “That’s really what you want to use it for?”

“When are you going after him?” Chris asks.

“As soon as we get a breather here,” Laura says, after a long pause. “You know we’d bring you along anyway.”

“But you wouldn’t listen to me,” Chris says. “Look. You might not trust me, but I spent longer with him than any of you. And I don’t—I don’t want to do anything else to him. Anything that will make it worse.”

Laura looks at him for longer this time. He knows she’s listening to his heartbeat, too, and listening and smelling and all the other signs. He wishes for a moment that he knew how Stiles managed it, whatever the man had done to fool them, and then he grimaces at himself, because that’s the last thing he should do.

“All right,” Laura says. She slides off the desk, pushing down her skirt, and then turns to him. “All right. Go get the ledgers, we’ll see if we can get anything done before Derek and Peter come back.”

“Thank you,” Chris says.

He gets off the desk and onto his feet, and she’s frowning at him. She puts her hand on his chest, still frowning, and she steps forward and her head tilts up towards him and her mouth is so red. 

Chris flinches. Laura looks at him, then snorts. She starts to pull away, stops, reconsiders him, and then she leans up and nuzzles the side of his neck. After a second’s hesitation, he nuzzles her back.

“I’m not alpha now,” she says, stepping back. “They don’t have to listen to me. But I’ll try to talk to them. So long as—”

“I know,” Chris says. “I know. I will.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Way, way back in the day, major papers in big cities often published two or more editions a day, in order to capture breaking news--hence morning, midday, and evening editions.
> 
> Incidentally, Resurrection Cemetery is the purported origin of the Resurrection Mary legend, the famous hitchhiking female ghost who gets a ride home from the dancehall with unsuspecting drivers, then disappears when they try to drop her off.


	3. Chapter 3

The blood trail goes across the roof of that building by the hotel, down a flight of stairs and then into a freight elevator. It stops in an alley on the side of the building opposite the hotel, next to fresh car tracks.

Chris and Laura kneel down to try and catch the scent. Stiles walks into the building, beats on a door till its superintendent comes out, and demands to know who’s rented any rooms in the last week. The terrified man confesses that two men had come that morning and rented one of the first-floor back rooms, paying three months’ rent up front, and that he hadn’t seen them since. He describes them as middling height, good suits, not talkative. Dark hair, no idea about the eyes, but one of them had had a ring the man remembered because it looked like the archbishop’s ring, and the man is a devout Catholic.

Stiles walks back out and calls Chris and Laura over. Laura’s frustrated because she thinks she has a scent, but it’s weak and wavering. She shuts up when Stiles looks at her, and lets him lead them over to where the valet has pulled around his car.

They drive a few blocks over to a speakeasy. Stiles shoves a thick fold of bills at the doorman, who shows them to a private room in the back that’s hosting a man and a gaggle of women. The doorman snaps for the women to scram and the man is demanding what’s going on when he sees Stiles, who promptly shoots him in one knee. Then Stiles flips the table out of the way, slaps the gun out of the man’s hand, and turns him face-down over the upended table.

He stabs his claws into the back of the man’s neck. Every time Chris has ever seen that done, the werewolf doing it had struggled to not collapse under the flood of another person’s thoughts. Stiles’ eyes redden and he inhales sharply a few times, but otherwise he seems unaffected.

They get back into the car. Stiles drives fast, but not recklessly; even if the cops they passed hadn’t had flashes of recognition in their faces, they probably wouldn’t be pulled over.

“Where is he?” Laura demands. “Who was it?”

“How good are you with a gun?” Stiles asks. “Revolver or shotgun or what?”

Laura starts to snap at him, then catches herself. She swallows hard and carefully curls her fingers away from the seats, so her claws won’t rip them. “I’m not a crack shot. Revolver.”

“You had that rifle when I came over to your house,” Stiles says.

It takes a moment for Chris to realize he’s being addressed. “I haven’t shot one since before that.”

Stiles snorts. “What, you forget how it works?”

He makes a stop at the Lexington, just long enough to give the valet a message to take up to the reception desk, and then makes another stop in an alley behind a mechanic’s shop. After two minutes he comes out of the shop with a pair of revolvers for Laura and a rifle for Chris, and plenty of bullets for both.

“Wolfsbane,” he says, taking off again.

This time he does sling the car around turns and jump curbs and cut within hairs of vans, but they’re in an industrial section and there aren’t too many people around. He pulls into another alley, parks the car, and then takes them up onto the roof of the building next to them. There are men stationed on top of another building a couple hundred yards upwind.

“Chris, stay on the roof, they’ll call for back-up,” Stiles says under his breath. “Laura, shoot the ones with rings on their hands, I don’t have time to take down their personal protections. We’re going all the way into the basement.”

He shakes himself, then _arches_ —and for a second Laura and Chris can only stare at the gigantic wolf in front of them. And it is a full-fledged wolf, with teeth the size of steak knives.

It huffs at them and they both cringe. The wolf side-steps and Chris just keeps on his feet; Laura looks just as shaky. Then it turns and it…flows over the roof. When it leaps Chris can see it shift to a two-legged shape and then back, as easy as water pouring from one bowl to another.

Chris shakes his head, then hurries in its wake. He can’t fully shift because of the rifle—if he has to swing it down to shoot, his claws will tangle in the trigger—so he has to take a more zigzag path to get enough cover for himself.

Laura goes on ahead, and hits the roof as the blood’s still spraying from the dying guards’ throat. She and Stiles disappear through the door to the downstairs while Chris is climbing onto the roof.

As violent as it is, it’s been very quiet. Chris tracks the two of them by heartbeat as they drop one floor, then another, and then their heartbeats disappear in the middle of a floor. Probably behind wards but Chris still jerks towards the door. Then he gets hold of himself, and pulls back.

He does a quick walk-around of the roof. Stiles hadn’t said where the reinforcements would be coming from, but the building is a floor taller than the rest for about a hundred yards around. On three of its sides, the alleys are too narrow for a car, while the street it fronts is relatively straight and unblocked for a good five blocks on either side. It’s a good choice, he has to admit.

One minute drags on, then another. There’s a sudden vibration under Chris’ feet—collapse or an explosion, either way, too big for runes to handle—and then a cacophony of frantic heartbeats, screams and shouts, an intermittent _crackling_ like—like lightning. The heartbeats are dropping away as quickly as they came, some of them so abruptly that twinges of nausea go through Chris’ head.

He shakes it off, and then pricks up as he hears a car coming. Two cars.

They have tommy guns hanging out their windows. Chris kneels down and braces the rifle on the low railing that runs around the roof.

His first shot goes into the hood of the car instead of the windshield like he’d wanted. It’s been a while, it’s a rifle he hasn’t had time to sight, but the familiar recoil of the butt against his shoulder makes him relax, and werewolf reflexes do the rest.

He shoots the drivers, and then, when the cars have smashed into each other, picks off the people who make it out. Some have glowing eyes, some don’t. Chris has killed people before, regular people who made bad decisions or wrong ones or harmful ones, and…he takes a breath, standing up, and then aims again and shoots out one of the still-spinning tires. It’s near a small lick of flame and the sudden burst of air blows that into an outright fire. The burning cars will keep that street blocked for at least a couple hours, and everyone in and around them is dead.

There’s a clatter and then a snarl that sets all the hairs on the back of Chris’ neck on end. He whips around and Laura scrambles out the door and onto the roof, swearing and trying to twist around to grab at something behind her. She’s covered in blood and she doesn’t seem to have the revolvers anymore.

A dark, swaying shape follows her, then collapses at her feet. She doesn’t move to touch it and Chris sees why when it swipes viciously at her. The swing is overextended and sends it rolling over onto its back, and it’s Peter.

He’s still shifted out, as some werewolves do when they’re too far into pain to remember their human side. He has tattered trousers on, and some scraps of shirt that don’t hide the line of burn marks down his chest and belly. His fingertips are bleeding and when Chris gets closer he sees that the claws have been wrenched out, and some of them haven’t grown back yet. And—his right eye is a blackened, oozing pit.

“He needs to shift back,” Laura hisses at Chris. She circles warily around her uncle, who doesn’t seem to have much sight in his remaining eye, from the way he bobs his head to sniff frantically around. “We can’t carry him around like that.”

Chris isn’t sure what to say to her. Then Stiles comes out onto the roof. He’s human again, and he’s so covered with blood that at first Chris thinks he’s changed clothes.

Peter’s head jerks around, and then he hauls himself half-over onto his arms, writhing from the pain but still trying to crouch back. He snarls again and it’s the wet rawness of it that is so wrong. It’s like his blood is dripping down onto Chris’ neck.

Stiles—Chris almost jumps forward, because Stiles’ face. It’s cold and blank and the only colder, deader thing Chris has seen is a broken bust his grandmother had once shown him, of a hunter who’d faced up to a medusa, killing her even as he turned to stone.

Then Stiles’ eyes blaze scarlet. He rears back and his mouth opens unnaturally wide, unhinging so much that there’s a good inch between the tips of his upper and lower fangs. The sound that comes from him isn’t a snarl, it’s an outright force.

Peter hitches back as it hits him. He wavers and then his head drops, his arms slide out from under him. He starts to whine and then he cries out in agony, twisting over and over. He grabs at himself and his bleeding fingertips leave fresh red streaks over his sides. At one point he beats the side of his face against the roof, and when he finally rolls away from the spot, it’s thick with sloughed-off black from his eye.

He shifts human, then collapses in a heap, curling in on himself. Laura drops next to him and slaps her hands to his back, snaking out the pain, but Peter wrenches himself away from her with a hurt gasp. Then he goes slack again, his missing eye tucked away from them, shaking violently with every rattling breath.

Chris jams the rifle under his arm and gets down on one knee, then eases forward on it. He’s a little closer to Peter than Laura is and he almost manages to touch Peter’s hip before the man flinches away from him.

Peter says something. It’s small and it’s agonized and it’s so full of blood it’s incoherent. He spits out blood, then rocks his head against the roof. “ _Alpha_ ,” he cries. “Alpha.”

Laura presses her lips together as she and Chris look at each other over the man. Then she starts to turn—except Stiles is next to Peter. On his knees, bent so they can’t see his face. He puts his hand on Peter’s side, then moves it to Peter’s shoulder. The veins flowing up the back of his hand crowd so thickly that he looks like he’s wearing a glove.

Stiles makes a rough, coughing noise. His head jerks slightly, and then he clears his throat, takes a deep breath, and he purrs at Peter, very low, like the rumbling of distant thunder. He smooths his hand up and down Peter’s shoulder and Peter whines, twists into him so Stiles is cradling his head. Peter’s breathing starts to calm, and when Laura puts her hands on his legs, he doesn’t throw her off.

“Peter,” Stiles says.

They all jump. Peter’s good eye rolls, half-focuses, and then he grimaces. “Stiles. Stiles, I’m—”

Stiles lifts Peter, slinging him over one shoulder. Peter lets out a hoarse, pained noise, but he’s trying to fight it down. They get him off the roof and into the car; Stiles has Laura take the wheel.

It’s a quick, quiet drive back to the hotel, although when they get there, Stiles directs Laura in a loop that takes them around it and up to the back of the other building, the one where Derek was to take their things. Stiles sends Chris up first, then Laura with Peter, and stays downstairs for a few minutes.

He isn’t long. Derek is still trying to not just tear up the walls after seeing Peter when Stiles comes up. There’s one door on that floor and Stiles unlocks it—both with a key and with drops of their blood—then lets them through.

It’s about half the size of the suite in the hotel, with odd angles and abruptly sloping patches in the ceiling, as if they’d fixed up an old attic. Books and papers are flung everywhere, nestling up with pieces of discarded clothing and jars and bottles of powders and brightly-colored liquids and pickled…parts.

“Bedroom’s that way,” Stiles says, pointing. Then he steps through the doorway. He pauses, looking at Derek and Laura hauling Peter between them, and then ducks around and stuffs a cigarette into his tightening mouth. “I’ll be back in a couple hours.”

“Stiles,” Chris says. When the other man glowers at him, he hesitates, then gestures at Stiles’ clothing.

“Oh. Right.” Stiles glances at himself as if he’d forgotten. Then he shrugs. He grins at Chris and it’s amused and it’s also icier than the Arctic. “Don’t worry about it. Where I’m going, this is practically the uniform.”

Laura’s disappeared into the bedroom with Peter, but Derek’s still in the doorway. He looks up and back at Stiles, whose smile goes rigid for a second.

Then Stiles shakes his head. “I said I’d be back,” he says. He looks from Chris to Derek, who tenses but who stays where he is, and then walks away, still smoking.

* * *

In an ideal world, clearing out Gerard’s men would be the breather that’d let them go. They have the money to pay off their debts, and bringing it in person would earn them back some respect, from what Chris knows of the men who sit at the top of the bootlegging hierarchy. But no sooner do they clean out the tunnels in the preserve when Laura brings home a bullet casing with the Calavera crest inscribed on it.

Chris attempts to set up a meeting with the Calaveras on neutral ground, hoping they’ll assume he went to ground when his house burned down, but they ambush him and Derek before he’s even sent the message. It turns out one of Gerard’s hunters had gone down south and spilled the beans about Gerard’s wolfskin belt, and now the Calaveras appear to believe the entire town is cursed. They’re barely holding back from torching everything and salting the ground, let alone caring _what_ Chris is now.

“Great,” Derek mutters. He drags his arm across his chest, then lets his shoulder pull after it, painstakingly flipping over with as little vertical movement as possible. “Two hours till closing time, Argent. Now what?”

He and Chris had to scramble for the rooftop of a small gas station on the outskirts of town. The balustrade running around the edge is barely enough to shield them when they’re flat out from the Calavera hunters, who have taken up cover all around the store. The Calaveras can’t move in while civilians are around, but daylight is dimming and the store isn’t on a very busy road. The next nearest building is a mile down the road.

“When was Peter expecting you back?” Chris asks.

Derek resettles himself on his belly, then turns his head and cracks his neck. “Three hours from now.”

Chris grimaces into the dust. “Damn.”

“We could call for help,” Derek says. He shrugs. “But then those assholes will probably firebomb the store like they did with Laura and that shed. And we’re not supposed to do that kind of thing in front of you.”

“Does that not bother you?” Chris hisses. His nerves are frayed. He hasn’t eaten since breakfast—and werewolves need much more food than normal people—he stayed up all night figuring out how to write the note they won’t be sending now, and he has a pebble in his damned shoe. “The clerk has no idea, he’s never done anything to you in his life.”

Derek rolls his head over to face Chris. “He used to flirt with my mother and joke about selling her rat poison so she could off my dad and marry him.”

This town, Chris finally thinks. Then he sighs. He puts his forehead against the roof, attempts to think, and instead gets hung up on how tight his tie is. So he pulls that over his head, and then unbuttons his shirt-collar and unsnaps his suspenders while he’s at it. He pulls the suspenders out from under his coat and rolls them up in one hand, then takes a deeper, freer breath. That much is cheap, at least.

“So you’re sleeping with my sister, too,” Derek says flatly.

Chris looks at him, stuffing the suspenders in a coat-pocket. His head inadvertently lifts and he picks out the click of a hammer being cocked back, and hastily spreads down again.

“Peter I can get,” Derek goes on. “Anyway, he’ll hurt you twice as much as you can ever hurt him. But Laura’s—”

“Is this about _my_ sister?” Chris sighs.

The breeze whistles over them. Derek’s heartbeat speeds up. His bones shift against each other, joints making minute pops and cracks as he readies himself, and then he breathes out slowly. His pulse stops sounding like a maniac with a drum.

“You said you don’t agree with what she did,” Derek finally says. “What does that mean?”

“It means—” Chris sets the point of his chin against the roof and lets it wobble, then grimaces and turns his head, facing away from Derek “—Argents kill werewolves. People aren’t as strong as werewolves, so they have to use their wits. They have to use tricks. But it’s not…it’s not _any_ kind of trick. You were a child, she wasn’t, it wasn’t fair.”

“So if she’d waited a couple of years.” Derek clicks his claws against the roof. “It would’ve been fine to burn my parents alive?”

“It would have been fine to burn their house to force them out,” Chris says slowly. He doesn’t turn his head but he stops listening for the hunters and concentrates on the man beside him. “It would have been fine to shoot them in the head. You were killing people, Derek, and using a gun instead of your claws and fangs doesn’t change that.”

Derek snorts. “Most of them were there because they were trying to kill us. Anyway, you’re on the other side of the fence now, and I don’t see you holding back. If everybody thinks they’re the ones who deserve to figure out who lives and who dies, someone has to be wrong.”

“Argents kill werewolves. And werewolves kill Argents.” Chris twists slightly onto his side, then eases his foot out of his shoe. He works his arm down and his knee up, and grabs the end of the shoe to give it a shake.

“You’re still a hunter,” Derek says. “You said so yourself.”

The shoe slips from Chris’ fingers, and he can’t stretch any farther without lifting himself. He tries anyway, then drops back and swears under his breath. Then he thinks about it, and hikes his leg up more to nudge the shoe towards his fingers with his knee.

He gets it, but then Derek snarls a warning and slaps a hand down on his back. A bullet clips the balustrade, just as a car comes rattling down the road.

The two of them freeze and hold their breath, but no other shots come. The car goes on, and in the store below the clerk lets out an exasperated mutter.

“You’re right,” Chris says. He feels Derek stir curiously and shrugs off the man’s hand, then twists back and gets his shoe on. Then he straightens himself out. “That everyone thinks they’re right. And we’re probably all wrong. I was wrong, my father was wrong, my sister was wrong…I just…I don’t care about being right anymore. But I just—there are some things I don’t want to see again, do again, if I don’t have to. If I can help it. It’s not any more complicated than that, Derek.”

The other man is silent for a while. The sun creeps towards the horizon, angling across the rooftop so that the side of Chris’ neck itches, then burns and heals over. He scratches off the flaking skin and goes to flick it off his hand, only to have Derek pin his wrist down. The hunters aren’t moving so Chris doesn’t understand. And then he thinks it’s because Derek thought he was flicking it in Derek’s face, except Derek isn’t even looking at his fingers.

“I thought for a long time that Kate did it because I did something to her,” Derek says. Then he looks down, at the roof under Chris’ face. “Honestly, part of me still does. You know. Maybe I didn’t tell her I loved her quick enough. Didn’t bring her the right flowers.”

“She hated bouquets,” Chris says.

Derek’s eyes go back to him. Then he grimaces, pushes Chris’ hand away. “I’ve had years to think about how stupid it is. How stupid I was. Don’t lecture me.”

“I’m sorry she hurt you with that,” Chris says. He shrugs when Derek glowers at him. “You don’t have to believe me, but I am. We do—we’ve done things like that, but not when they’re as young as you were. You should be able to grow up before you deal with something like that.”

“She could lie and lie and lie, and her heart wouldn’t even skip,” Derek says after a moment, still looking at Chris. But he’s bitter, not angry. “Stiles did that too. Even Peter, he didn’t pick up a thing. He lied.”

Chris hesitates, then lets his breath out slowly. “He had reason to.”

“I know he did,” Derek mutters. He shifts restlessly against the roof, then snarls to himself. His claws leave furrows in the dust around them, and then he retracts them and his fingertips scrape faint pink tracks after them. “We _did_ do something to him. And don’t give me any bullshit about we didn’t know. Werewolves don’t look at it the same, you kill an omega you know they had an alpha at some point and you take that chance. Well, we did, and—”

“Stop talking,” Chris says. “Look, stop, it’s not going to—”

“He means more to me than Kate ever did,” Derek says. It’s simple, calm, and as brutal as anything Peter has ever said. “You know, when he walked out, I wanted him to kill me. I never thought that about her.”

Chris exhales into the roof. He feels very tired all of a sudden, and bizarrely, the thought of taking a nap actually crosses his mind. They’ve been here too damned long, he thinks.

“I know,” he says. He senses Derek peering at him and turns away, trying to look behind them. “About feeling like that.”

They didn’t get a good look when they first jumped up, and Chris had thought it was just a solid slab of concrete, but when he cranes his head, he catches a glint of metal under the layer of dust. He squints and makes out a ring, and maybe a square of metal beneath it.

“Door,” he says, jerking his head so Derek will look. “If we can get downstairs, they can’t see into the whole store. Could get at the phone.”

Derek grunts his agreement, and starts working himself around to face the other way. He has to stop to let Chris turn; they’re too close together to twist at the same time and there’s not a lot of space to either side of them. It takes a good twenty minutes and they’re nearly out of time, but they finally get over there and it _is_ a trapdoor, thank God.

“If you’re going to hurt them, do it to their face,” Derek says, reaching for the lever.

“I’m not going to hurt,” Chris starts.

Derek looks up before he can ask. “Peter matters, too. I just worry less about him,” he tells Chris. Then he wraps his hand around the lever. “On three.”

They knock out the clerk and then have the operator connect them with the police station to report a robbery. The sheriff’s back on payroll, since the Calaveras aren’t interested in settling in for the long-term, and he promises that squad cars will be down in ten minutes.

“I don’t like killing people,” Derek says while they’re waiting. He’s staring at the unconscious clerk. “I don’t hate it either, I just don’t think about it like Peter does. But every time we leave somebody alive, it seems to hurt us. And every time we kill somebody—”

“That’s the risk,” Chris says. He leans against the wall and listens to the heartbeats in the grass and bushes around the building. “And if you get it wrong, then you just—”

“Make it right?” Derek says. Half-skeptical, half-something softer, rawer.

Chris snorts. “You live with it. Who knows what’s right, remember?”

Derek glances at him, then deliberately turns his back on Chris. They wait in opposite corners of the store till the others come.

* * *

Stiles has more types of wolfsbane stocked in his apartment than Chris has ever seen. The room where they find all his drugs and compounding equipment is bigger than the master bath, and it’s full from ceiling to floor.

Chris and Laura spend the rest of the night trading off between getting antidotes into Peter and trying to siphon off his pain. Stiles _does_ come back, just long enough to drop off food, get them a salve for Peter’s eye, and take Derek out with him. He doesn’t say where they’re going or what they’ll be doing, and Laura has to step out of the bathroom for a few minutes to calm herself down afterward.

By the time dawn comes, they’re all exhausted but Peter’s healed, except for that eye. The salve _is_ regrowing it, which is beyond anything Chris has ever heard of—or Laura, for that matter—but it’s slow and painful. They have to pack it with gauze into the socket every couple of hours, and even riddled with cold sweats, Peter’s strong enough to send one or the other of them into the walls. He breaks Chris’ arm a couple times, and dislocates both of Laura’s shoulders.

When the latest wad of gauze is patched over Peter’s face, Laura drops like a stone across the foot of the bed. Chris slumps against the headboard and watches Peter shiver by his hip. The man’s in pain—he’s burned through the morphine _and_ the laudanum—but Chris doesn’t make a move to drain it from Peter. He knows if he does, it’ll knock him out and he’s not that sure he’ll wake up again.

He’s falling asleep anyway, and he doesn’t know if he’ll wake up from that either, but he can’t manage to keep himself awake. His head thumps back against the wall and the world starts to fade—

—he hears a new heartbeat. Two of them. Chris jerks his head down. At the other end of the bed, Laura rolls over onto her hands and knees, facing the doorway. Then she drops back onto her belly, grunting in exhaustion.

“They’re back,” she mutters.

Peter stirs. Drags himself painfully on his arms, drawing the rest of his body around in a loose half-circle. The flesh is healed but he’s probably got inflammation everywhere from shock and fighting off the drugs. It must feel like he’s made of red-hot pins and needles but he pushes till Chris pulls his legs up and out of the way, and then inches to the edge of the bed.

Derek walks by the doorway, with just a quick glance inside. His stride breaks slightly and Peter cocks his head awkwardly, compensating for the lost eye, and then Derek keeps on going. There’s another bathroom down the hall, Chris remembers. He can smell blood, a lot of it, that and gasoline. And, oddly enough, garlic and olive oil.

“How was the pasta?” Laura asks, when Stiles comes up.

Stiles pauses just outside the doorway, blinking. Then his nostrils flare. “Oh. Right. No, I wish we had time to eat. We just blew up the basement of an Italian joint, that’s all.”

He lingers on the threshold for a few minutes, flicking his gaze from one to the other of them. His right leg jiggles and he looks like a nervous choirboy waiting in the wings—Chris has to rub his hand against his mouth to bury his snort, which, to be honest, is just as nervous. He starts to reach for his cigarettes twice, and both times jerks his hand back down.

“So apparently, I scare people,” he says.

“Ah,” Peter rasps. He barely has a voice at this point, but he still manages to sound amused.

Stiles’ mouth twists. He glances down the hall, then abruptly walks into the room. He’d changed his clothes since the last Chris saw, and washed up at some point too, because there’s a little blood in the nooks of his ears and under his nails, and some grease on his cuffs, but otherwise he _looks_ clean. He smells like a slaughterhouse crossed with a grease fire.

“It wasn’t so much of a big deal back when it was just me,” Stiles goes on. He pulls his coat off and tosses it aside, then strips himself of belt and suspenders. His shirt-tails start to come out and he bats at one, then shrugs and tugs them the rest of the way out. Then he turns around and sits down on the bed between Peter and Laura. “Everybody figured I was just some crazy mercenary omega—people who figured out I was a werewolf, anyway. It’s kind of surprising how you pull on gloves and throw a little mountain ash around, draw some runes, and people overlook the glowy eyes and big teeth.”

When he lifts his shoes to pull them off, Chris can see more blood crusted up around the heel, and his socks are damp and streaked with black. He gets rid of both and then flops backwards on the bed.

Peter winces silently, but doesn’t move. He does when Stiles puts his hand on Peter’s hip, but it’s barely a flinch. “Sorry,” Stiles says absently. “Anyway. People didn’t, you know, know about Scott either. So it was fine. I got invites when they needed another alpha offed, but nobody asked me out to dinner. Not a big deal, I can make my own fun. But then they hear about Scott’s funeral, and after that you show up, and now I’m so scary that they want to kill me.”

“A lone alpha’s not that bad. You can always get them when they’re sleeping. A pack’s a real threat.” When Stiles turns his head towards her, Laura shrugs and curls herself up against the footboard. “That’s what we’re all taught, anyway.”

“Nobody actually _told_ me that kind of thing. I mean, I killed my alpha two days later,” Stiles says. He looks back at the ceiling. “Self-taught werewolf here. So I don’t know the club rules. Should that really be a big deal?”

“Do you know who it is?” Chris asks.

“I own the whole building,” Stiles says after a moment. He puts up his hand while Chris has only half-thought that that doesn’t make any sense. “Next door’s just for business. I own this place, did it top to bottom. Unless they want to start the second Great Chicago Fire, nobody’s getting at it.”

Chris closes his mouth, and not because Laura is shooting him the sort of look she usually reserves for her brother. He rubs at the side of his face, then grimaces as he feels layers of sweat scrubbing off under his fingers. “Sorry. I…honestly didn’t think anybody here would give a damn if we came up. Argent doesn’t hold any weight east of the Mississippi, except in Louisiana, and—”

“It’s been a while since other packs invited us to any parties either,” Laura says dryly. Then she drops her eyes to the bed. “We’re sorry, Stiles.”

“Oh, for…” Stiles exhales in an exasperated gust. He stares at the ceiling for another second, then pushes himself up, his hands slapping onto his knees. “It’s not like _you_ made me so unhinged and crazy and all-around nasty that they decided it’s safer to just whack me.”

He pauses. His fingers clench over his knees and Chris finds himself tucking in his heels in case he needs to leap for it.

“You didn’t,” Stiles finally mutters. He unclenches his hands, then shakes his head. He takes out his lighter but not his cigarettes, snapping the flame on and off. “Scott left for a reason.”

“Still, this isn’t.” Peter swallows roughly. He twists a little, trying to angle himself towards Stiles—his blind eye is closest and Chris doubts he can actually see the other man—and then has to stop when a tremor goes through him. “This is not—what we wanted. Stiles. I said—you don’t have to—whatever I said, you don’t—”

“You sound like shit,” Stiles says, looking at him. The lighter snaps off. Stiles glances at it, bounces it in his hand and then puts it away.

Then he pulls his legs up onto the bed. He leans over Peter and Peter flattens where he is, chin lifting, and then can’t completely stifle a pained groan. Stiles pauses, then snorts and just twists himself over the top of Peter, landing in the narrow space between the other man, Chris and the headboard.

When Peter tries to roll over, Stiles grabs him by the shoulder. Of course Peter stops, but he keeps trying to crane his head around, get past the bandage over his eye. Stiles sighs in irritation and slides his hand up to Peter’s cheek, nudging the man’s head back around. He curls up behind Peter’s back and Peter drops all resistance once he realizes that, letting his head sink to the bed.

“How’s the eye coming?” Stiles says. He pulls his hand back to Peter’s shoulder, then lets it come to rest in the curve of Peter’s neck. His thumb moves up to Peter’s cheek, just under the bandage, dark lines twisting under the skin of it.

“At this rate, another day before it’s back,” Laura says. She moves her hand in a little deprecating gesture. “From what it’s been looking like, anyway. I’ve never even heard of the stuff before.”

“ _Apparently_ , that’s also scary. That I go to rare book auctions and put herbalists on retainer instead of spending all my money on prostitutes and drugs,” Stiles mutters. “It’s _unnatural_. They can’t understand how my mind works so they can’t trust that I’ll do what I’m told. So, all right, that is true, but I don’t see what that has to do with reading and plants.”

Peter snorts, then chuckles, very quietly and very slowly. He’s still obviously hurting but his body is starting to relax, his claws receding for the first time since they brought him in. Then Stiles moves his arm so it’s lying over Peter instead of against his back, pulling himself up closer, and Peter stiffens.

Stiles jerks back. There’s something off about his mouth and jaw and Chris grabs the headboard, getting up, but then it’s gone. And Peter’s neck isn’t bloody.

“Shit. Did that hurt?” Stiles says. “Shit.”

“What?” Then Peter shakes his head emphatically. “What, no, just…what did…”

“I read it somewhere. I mean, it’s more for drawing out poison, but if you go with the eastern theories that all pain is essentially a type of poison, and…well, like I said. Nobody taught me. Book-learning.” Stiles shrugs. He’s settling back behind Peter, though he still looks edgy.

Peter’s head turns, but unless he wants to roll completely over onto his back, he won’t be able to look at Stiles. He moves his shoulders in irritation, then slowly lowers himself back down. His chin lifts and his shoulders drop a little, and then he makes a low, kind of fluting call. It’s strangely high-pitched, though it’s not screechy. _Hurts-hurt-submit-come_.

Chris feels a sharp urge to nestle down next to them. Across the bed, Laura shifts in place, looking both amused and nervous. She’s watching Stiles, though she turns when a curt, quick step sounds in the hall. Derek appears in the doorway, towel still in hand. He frowns as he takes it all in, then presses himself against the jamb as he watches Stiles bend his head towards Peter’s nape. 

Stiles slides his hand from Peter’s neck to his arm, then moves it under the arm to wrap around the other man’s waist. He’s got his mouth touching the back of Peter’s neck. His cheeks hollow slightly and then Chris starts as Stiles’ lips turn completely black. Stiles still has his eyes open and they roll to look up at Chris, who grits his teeth and holds where he is.

After a few seconds of sucking, Stiles moves back. He pulls out a handkerchief and coughs wetly into it, then balls it up and tosses it into a wastebin near the bed. He grimaces. “Tastes worse than motor oil.”

“Those were nicer books than I got when I officially made head of pack,” Laura says after a moment. She pulls herself further across the bed, making room for Derek, who finally comes in.

He climbs onto the bed and then stoops on one forearm so he can touch cheeks with Peter, who’s relaxed so much he almost looks comfortable there. Derek sniffs around the eye bandage, then pulls himself over onto his side so he’s up against Peter’s belly. He’s careful not to put his weight against the other man, even when Laura crawls up to his back and then pillows her head on it.

“I got a meeting in the morning,” Stiles says. He shifts back so he’s up against the headboard, next to Chris. Then he rolls his eyes and pulls out his watch. He looks at it as if it’s a piece of dog shit. “Well. In an hour and a half.”

“A meeting?” Derek says. He stops halfway to putting his head down, then lifts it to look at Stiles. He hesitates, then looks down at Peter. “Never mind. We can—”

“We’re good for a couple days, I told you,” Stiles says irritably. “Anyway, they don’t care any more which one of you I actually bit, they’ll just take whichever one they see first. You should stay put.” 

Then he sighs, and puts his hand out just as Derek’s hunching down. He wiggles his fingers, and when Derek moves tentatively towards them, he scrapes a stray flake of blood from Derek’s jaw. Curls his fingertips against the underside of Derek’s chin for a second, and Derek doesn’t look quite as surprised by it as he should, though as much pain as enjoyment flits around his face in that second.

“You don’t have to fake it,” Derek says. “We know, we’re not stupid. This doesn’t change what happened. Getting mad at them doesn’t mean you have to like us now.”

“Sure. Exactly,” Stiles mutters. He pulls his hand away and puts both his hands between his knees, squatting up by the headboard. Then he shakes his head, and he looks over at Chris. “So what do you want?”

“I guess not to die, and a good long sleep. And a hot shower after that,” Chris says after a moment. He can’t help a sour smile at the way Stiles looks at him. “I don’t think that’s a lot to ask for.”

Stiles rolls his eyes and turns his head away. He’s still, or at least looks still, for a couple seconds, but then Chris feels the bed shift. He looks over again and Stiles has slid down the headboard to sit. Then the other man pushes his feet out, till they’re just short of Peter’s back.

“Hour and a half,” he says to himself. His eyes nearly shut, but under the lids he glances at Chris one last time. Then he shrugs. He puts his arms up on his knees and then leans his head against his arms.

Chris wonders if Stiles is really sleeping, and then decides that’s the least of his concerns. He humps the pillow up behind him, so he can rest his head on its top, and then crosses his arms over himself. Closes his eyes and then he’s out.

* * *

On their last day in Beacon Hills, Chris has his leg snapped in a steel-jaw trap.

Whoever set it didn’t anchor the chain properly, so he yanks the eye-bolt out of the ground and then hobbles as fast as he can. Thankfully, he’s only a few yards from his car, and it’s his left leg so he can still drive.

He’s bleeding too much to make it all the way back to the Hales’ apartment, so he pulls into the parking lot behind a basement speakeasy they supply. Then he pries the trap off with the help of a crowbar, and limps into the speakeasy to get something to eat and drink, and to call for someone to pick him up.

Chris knows they’ll all be out, but Laura’s supposed to be home in half an hour, and the speakeasy is both on a busy street and definitely unwilling to cooperate with the Calaveras, fervent temperance supporters that they are. And no one there bats an eye at a man with a bloody, mauled trouser leg and a spotless calf.

He’s exhausted. Three omegas have come in over the past week, two of them looking to challenge for territory, and the Calaveras somehow managed to miss both of them but got Derek with electrified, poisoned barbed wire. Even after they smashed the generator and cut the wire, it took the better part of two hours to get all the barbs out of him, and then Chris was up again at dawn to help Laura finish coordinating the last whiskey shipments they owe for the month.

So Chris curls up in one of the backrooms and falls into a fitful sleep. He’s exhausted but the pianist is practicing in the other room and becoming a werewolf, as it turns out, comes with perfect pitch. Two of the B-sharps are out of tune and Chris can’t shut them out.

After fifteen minutes, Chris gives up. He wanders out into the hall and runs into one of the waitresses, an omega the Hales have allowed to stay for a couple months now. She commiserates with him about the piano and tells him that the store on the first floor—an old barbershop that closed a couple weeks ago—can be accessed from a back staircase.

He thanks her, and he heads up and she heads on to the back where the booze is stored. The first-floor store’s windows are boarded up and the place is mostly empty, but someone’s left one barber’s chair. Chris gets into it and then dozes off.

An explosion throws him out of the chair and into the windows. He breaks the glass but bounces off the boards, then falls into a scattering of shards. Swearing, Chris scrambles out of it and up against the front door. He yanks glass out of his hands and shins, listening to the screams and shouts outside. It sounds like most people think there’s something wrong in the back, so Chris breaks the lock on the back door and then slips out.

Smoke is billowing up into the sky, thick and black. He runs out and there’s a huge hole in the ground, right over where the basement storage room would’ve been, exposing rafters wreathed with flames. Some of the screaming is coming from inside the basement.

People are trying to get down into it, but the fire’s too hot. There’s another entrance in the front so Chris heads around the building, only to get a whiff of wolfsbane. He ducks to the side and then there’s an outraged shout, someone screaming that there’s the gangster.

Chris turns around just in time to see an angry mob throwing bricks, bottles, and whatever else is lying around the alley at the stunned Calavera hunter, who’s stupidly tried to draw on Chris in broad daylight. A woman’s handbag knocks the gun out of the hunter’s hand, and then Chris grabs a nearby crate and tosses it at the hunter.

It hits and the man falls over. The mob surges forward at him and Chris backs off, then spins around and goes for the speakeasy’s front door. He glances around for other hunters, but either they’ve run off or they knew better in the first place not to stick with such an idiot.

The front door’s already open, and as Chris goes through it, he’s nearly run over by the coughing, gagging pianist. He dodges the man and pushes his head through the doorway, straining to hear over the crackle and snap of failing timbers.

There’s one more heartbeat. He pulls his head out, takes as deep a breath as he can, and then goes inside.

Chris doesn’t have to go that far. Five or six steps and his foot hits something that whimpers. He stoops and gets his arms under them, and then carries them out to the sidewalk. Some people spot him and shout for the doctor, while others come up and try to help him carry the victim.

They’re hindering more than helping and it takes something like five minutes to get the body down on the ground. Then Chris looks at it, and happens to breathe in at the same time, and between the sight and the smell he almost chokes on vomit. He can’t even tell it’s a person—the flesh is charred black all over, except for obscenely white teeth. Then they open their mouth and they let out a ragged cry, close enough to a howl for him to recognize the voice of the omega waitress. She must have been standing right next to the whiskey when the firebomb went down on it.

Her cry’s unearthly enough to make most of the people drop back, looking confused and fearful. But Chris drops to his knees next to her. He touches her arm—what’s left of it—but the flesh flakes away before he can even try to draw out her pain.

She tries to say something. At least, the flesh around her teeth seems to move, and air whistles through it. Chris leans closer and then starts back as the woman suddenly spasms up towards him, teeth chattering. Then he starts again as someone grabs his arm.

“Who is it?” Laura says.

“It’s—” he can’t remember her name “—omega, worked here—”

Laura’s fingers seize around his arm. She sucks in her breath, looking down at the woman. Who’s dying, that’s clear. To all of them, including the woman, whose eyes snap wide open. Too wide, all the flesh crisped back from around them.

“Alpha,” she rasps, staring at him and Laura. “ _Kill_.”

Chris knows what she’s asking for. But he doesn’t do anything. He can’t. There are too many people around, and anyway—anyway, he can’t move. He can’t remember how.

Laura is still clutching at Chris’ arm. She’s breathing shorter and shorter, and he can feel her starting to sway. The woman looks desperately at her and a thin, shaking whine comes out of Laura, too soft for anybody but Chris and the woman to hear. She doesn’t do anything and neither does Chris.

The woman dies fifteen minutes later, twisting in agony as a doctor, having finally arrived, tries to give her morphine.

“We have to go,” Laura says. She’s still shaking, and still has Chris’ arm. She yanks at it and her voice rises. “Chris. _Chris_. We have to—”

Then she slaps him. Chris snaps back from it, then bites down his snarl as he notices the doctor looking over. He lets Laura drag him up and over to the car.

They go back to the apartment. Their train tickets are for the next day, but Laura has their things sent down and drives them to the station, where she changes the tickets for a train two hours from now. Peter and Derek show up a half-hour later, Derek still woozy from having so much wolfsbane tincture singed out of him, and they get on the train.

Private car. Chris collapses in one corner, Laura in another. Derek pesters his sister periodically till she finally rouses and gives him a curt summary of what happened. Then he leaves her alone.

“The likelihood of another Scott is very low, I would think,” Peter finally says. He seems the calmest but the longer Laura goes without speaking, the more he paces the car. “We _know_ her alpha, I’ve even met him, he’s hardly the type to care.”

“I could’ve—carried her into a building,” Chris mutters, and Peter stops pacing. “Told them I was making her comfortable. I should’ve thought of that.”

Peter looks at him for a long moment. “And you’d explain the broken neck by…”

“Cover her nose and mouth with my hand.” Chris rubs his hands over his face, then drags his head between his palms. “She asked for that.”

“She asked for the _alpha_ to kill her,” Laura says.

Derek is sitting with her. He wraps his arm over her shoulders and she allows it, but doesn’t soften into him.

“There’s no alpha,” Chris snaps. “And a mess is a mess. It’ll stay till someone cleans it up and it doesn’t care who that is.”

“Well, _someone_ ,” Peter says pointedly. “Alphas aren’t just about eye color. Either you know what to do or you don’t. The mess might not care, but we do. You do.”

Chris jerks halfway to his feet. He hears Derek start up, too, but Laura must hold him back because he grunts and then thuds down again. And Peter tenses but he doesn’t take his hands from where they’re clasped behind his back.

“I know,” Chris says after a second. Then he hisses at himself. He sits back down and then leans his head against the wall. “I know. I just know that I haven’t known what the hell I’ve been doing since…God. I can’t even tell now.”

He closes his eyes. Peter resumes pacing, but then his footsteps veer near Chris. They falter briefly, and then Peter sits down next to Chris.

“The whole point of pack is that you don’t have to be all things, all the time,” Peter says. “You have others. Everyone does what they need to at some point, and the rest of the time the pack does it.”

“And that’s why we’re failing,” Chris says, opening his eyes.

Peter looks down at his hands, cupped over each other in his lap. His head inclines very slightly. “Yes, Chris,” he says, more quietly. “That’s why we’re failing.”

* * *

Chris wakes up because Derek and Laura are changing the dressing on Peter’s eye. Peter isn’t throwing people around anymore, but he’s still thrashing enough to shake Chris off the bed. Then Derek, trying to hold his uncle down, comes within a hair of slamming his foot into Chris’ head. So Chris gives in and gets up. Laura barks tersely that they’re fine so he goes out into the hall.

Stiles isn’t anywhere in the apartment, though his scent’s all over a barely-touched platter of cold food in the living room. Chris considers the food for a minute or so; his stomach is starving but the idea of putting anything on that platter into his mouth makes his tongue curl away from his teeth in revulsion.

He washes up instead. He doesn’t think he did that much last night—and his memory seems continuous to him—but he has to run the shower for a good twenty minutes before the water in the drain swirls clean. Most of it seems to be soot and dust, but there are specks of dull red and light purple, probably from dealing with Peter’s eye.

Once he’s dried off, Chris doesn’t bother with anything past shirt and trousers, although habit makes him at least tuck in the shirt and fold back the unfastened cuffs. He goes back to the food, for lack of anything else to do, and manages to nibble some pastries. Derek wanders out at that point and falls ravenously upon the deli cuts and antipasti at the other end of the platter.

“Peter’s pulling the stuffing out of the bed,” Derek mutters. He folds up a piece of Parma ham and stuffs it into his mouth, then flicks another one at Chris. “Laura’s too tired.”

Chris sticks with his buttered roll. “I’m too tired.”

Derek glances up at him, then snorts. He’s pushing more of the deli cuts around, dividing them into three portions. “I didn’t mean go drain his pain. He’s not hurting so much now, he’ll be all right. But you can’t sleep in there, Laura’s got the only spot left that’s not torn up.”

There’s one other bedroom, and an office that’s probably large enough for some cushions borrowed from around the place. “You can have the bed,” Chris says. Then he catches Derek’s look and shrugs. “Did you want to sleep with me, too?”

Derek’s more likely to ignore Chris than be hostile these days, but once in a while he shows that same streak of vindictive humor that Peter does. His teeth glimmer in a quick, sarcastic smile, and then he resumes pushing around the meat. He’s piling up the slices on bread, alternating with limp lettuce leaves to make sandwiches.

“He’s not any less mad,” he says. His hands pause. Then he flips on the top pieces of bread and pushes down on them so the soft white middles cotton up between his fingers. “But I think he’s less…urgent about it.”

“Did he fuck you when you were out?” Chris says. He can’t help a snort at Derek’s fierce, wounded look. Then he shrugs again. He finishes off the roll and then steps back from the platter. “Maybe. But he was pretty patient to start with, I thought.”

“You can’t just—you and Laura, and even Peter, you all just—it’s like you _want_ him to stay mad,” Derek snaps. “I don’t think he’s having any fun with that. I don’t think it helps.”

Chris is irritated—no, angry with the other man. But then fatigue pricks at his eyes and drags at his shoulders and hands. He rubs the side of his face, looking at Derek. “Yeah.”

Derek scowls back, then jerks his head away. He takes his hands off the sandwiches and rubs them roughly on his legs, then lets out a frustrated sigh. Then he glances at Chris.

“I’m going to bring these in,” he says, with a hook of his chin at the sandwiches. “You can have the other bed till I’m done. Or Peter’s pried his claws out of me, whichever.”

He takes the sandwiches and walks off. Chris looks after him for a moment. Thinks maybe he should call after Derek.

Instead Chris ends up in the kitchen. It looks like it’d been galley-sized at one point, but he can see where a wall’s been knocked out between it and a closet, and the stove has six burners, any one of which is large enough to handle the classic witch’s cauldron. When he puts a kettle on, it looks like a children’s toy, and the gas flames almost envelope the thing before he figures out how to turn them down.

He’s on his second pot of coffee when he smells a different burnt scent. “Keeping it all for yourself?” Stiles asks.

Tobacco doesn’t do anything for werewolves, like most recreational drugs for humans, and it smells—it’s not the most unpleasant smell, and can be ignored with some effort, but what’s irritating is how it seems to build up an oiliness in the nose. It feels a little like a cold coming on.

Though Chris doesn’t turn his head away, when Stiles comes closer. He reaches up into the cabinet and gets out another mug, and then holds it out. Stiles considers it, shrugs and takes it. Puts his cigarette out on the stovetop while Chris is pouring him a cup.

“Do you like them?” Stiles suddenly says, staring into the coffee. His free hand waves aimlessly in the air. “I mean—at all? Anything about them? Or is this just—regular meetings of people I once tried to kill and actually didn’t?”

“I don’t know what kind of question that is.” Chris feels his shoulders hunch and his neck bow when Stiles glares at him, but he tries not to let his eyes drop below the man’s face. Drinking coffee at least gives him a natural way to lower his head. “Just because I laugh when Peter says something doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten all the mangled corpses he’s left over the years. And I might smell like Laura’s perfume but I remember my wife’s face when she realized she was turning.”

Stiles stares at him. He forgets most of the time that Stiles is the same age Allison would have been. Even when Stiles is playing up his youth, he’s always got a hard edge; it’s just a matter of whether that edge comes off as brashness or true violence.

He doesn’t have it right now. Chris knows that’s a momentary aberration, nowhere near a weakness, but it’s strange, seeing him so attentive and nothing else.

“I hate them,” Chris says meditatively. He tilts his head. “And it’s not that the rest of the time, I don’t hate them. But…it fits, the way I hate them now. It fits with everything else—fits better than any other time in my life. Which is a joke but it’s true. We fit. And I don’t have any run left in me. This is it and I just…have to see it through.”

“This is,” Stiles starts. He looks at his coffee again, then shoves it onto the counter. “I blackmailed the Commission into backing off.”

Chris looks sharply at him.

“Dad wasn’t on the take, but he kept tabs on who was. He knew he couldn’t root it out, just wanted to make sure he could do some good around it.” Stiles shrugs. “I still have all his files. Told them, they didn’t back off, I was going to kill my way through town _and_ hand all that stuff over to the feds.”

“They don’t like snitches,” Chris says after a moment.

“And I don’t like being dead,” Stiles says, looking at him. Then he laughs. “Besides, it’s not really snitching if it’s just cops and police chiefs getting into trouble. Dad didn’t have solid stuff on the gangsters, didn’t have the resources. But it’s hard to do business if your whole bribery network goes up in flames. Hell, they might even elect some clean hands for once.”

Chris has his doubts about that view of snitching, but he’s not particularly attached to any kind of honor code at this point, and he certainly doesn’t believe in people’s ability to stick to such codes. So he nods and drinks the rest of his coffee.

“The boys in New York, they aren’t really that personally invested anyway. They were turning a blind eye to some of the middlemen seeing if they could make a name for themselves, but at the end of the day they just want a good, solid racket,” Stiles goes on. “Of course, Capone’s not going to give up Chicago but he doesn’t give a damn about anywhere else, and I don’t want to take over the Outfit. And anyway, he knows this keeps up, I’ll kill off enough of his men to give him trouble against New York.”

“You’re leaving?” Chris says.

Stiles presses his lips together, losing the vague careless air. “I’m not in love with here,” he finally says. “After my dad died, it was just where I happened to be. Anywhere people want to drink, anywhere you can see the full moon, I could be.”

Chris inhales but he doesn’t ask. He has to bite his lip, but he doesn’t ask. He puts his cup on the counter, and then he twists around. Gets his cup and Stiles’ cup, and puts them in the sink with the empty kettle. He doesn’t clatter them around but he rubs his hands against the walls of the sink afterward, trying to get them to stop trembling.

“I was doing all that reading and looking into things for Scott,” Stiles says. “So, you know, if he came back, I could…I’d have a better idea what I was doing. This isn’t a do-over, I didn’t even want—but it’s what I got. What you said, yeah, it’s what we get.”

He steps up behind Chris. Puts his hands on Chris’ hips, just as Chris is going to turn, and so Chris doesn’t. Chris drops his head instead, drops it and spreads his hands to either side of the sink bottom, taking shaking breath after shaking breath. Stiles pushes into his back, warm, relentless, breath running silky fingers up his nape.

“It fits,” Stiles mutters. He pauses, then presses the side of his face into Chris’ spine. His nose nudges between two bony knobs, his mouth lips around a third. They shiver as he snorts into Chris’ neck. “But it fits. What you _did_ to him, damn you, God, why I can’t just look at that—it fits.”

Chris fists and unfists his hands against the porcelain. Stiles lets out a slow, steady breath against his throat and he closes his eyes. Lowers his head even more, feels the other man slide up to make up the difference.

“Alpha?” he says, very softly.

Stiles stills. Then he sighs. Closes his hands tight on Chris’ hips, rubs his cheek across the back of Chris’ neck and then bends around to set his teeth in Chris’ throat. They sting, even though the bite’s more lips than points; Chris shudders, flattens his hands against the sink.

When Stiles pulls away he whines. Stiles snorts, licks at the pinpricks his teeth have left. His hands dig at Chris’ hips, grind the bones painfully, and then relax just as Chris thinks they’ll snap. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. Come on, let’s go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Lexington Hotel was Al Capone’s headquarters for the latter part of his reign in Chicago.
> 
> I just want to point out that Chris is making those shots at a moving vehicle with pretty primitive sighting technology and a strange rifle he hasn't had time to calibrate. Honestly, why more werewolves don't take up firearms, I don't know, because their senses and reflexes would make them pretty awesome gunmen.


	4. Epilogue

_A Month Later_

When they walk in, Derek has his head buried between Peter’s legs. Both of them are sprawled over the bed, half-dressed. Peter turns his head towards the door, rocking up on his hips, then hikes up one knee to half-heartedly shield his groin.

“Is that the new one? I like the peacock feather,” he says to Laura. “Not as—as gauche as I’d thought—”

Laura smiles at him, stripping off her gloves. She tosses those aside, along with the hat he’s admiring, and then tilts her head to take off her earrings. “I thought you were at the council meeting,” she says, wandering towards the bathroom.

“Adjourned early.” Peter shrugs, his head lolling against the bed. He watches through lazy, narrowed eyes as she shuts the door behind her, then arches with a sigh catching in his throat.

“If they passed that ordinance on driving trucks through town after seven, I’m going to be very irritated.” Stiles strolls into the room. When Chris moves out of his way, he pauses to reach out and tug Chris’ tie loose, and then he swings around the end of the bed so he can walk up and put his hand on Derek’s back. “One thing Hollywood never tells you, how much crime is about herding dumb greedy local politicians.”

He starts at the small of the back, then smooths his hand up Derek’s spine when the other man pushes into the touch. Stiles leans over and grips Derek’s neck, leaning his hip against Derek’s ass. Then he pulls Derek to the side, and out from between Peter’s legs.

Derek grunts, irritated, but that turns into a low burr of pleasure when Stiles rubs his thumb along the side of Derek’s neck. Then Stiles lets go, sitting down between Peter’s knees; Derek starts to say something, spots the cigarette in Stiles’ mouth, and shuts up and settles down where he is.

“It didn’t pass,” Peter says. He kneads the bed, keeping his hands at his sides, watching Stiles light up.

“Great,” Stiles says, flat and not particularly excited. He puts his lighter away, then reaches up to finger the cigarette. He still has his gloves on, well-worn black leather that makes Peter shiver when his other hand lands on Peter’s knee.

Stiles looks at Peter’s knee. Then at Peter’s thigh, following his hand as he pushes it along the muscle. It disappears behind Peter’s other leg and Peter’s head goes back, his chin jerking straight up at the ceiling. Peter hitches his hips up, sucking in his breath, his fingers stabbing rigidly into the sheets.

“Were you even cleaning him out?” Stiles says after a second, looking at Derek. “Still feels pretty slick in there.”

“I was getting around to it,” Derek says. His gaze flicks back and forth between Stiles and his moaning, arching uncle.

Stiles rolls his eyes. Takes a drag, his arm moving a little behind Peter’s knee, and then he pulls his arm away. He holds his damp fingers out and lets Derek lick tentatively at them, then abruptly twists his wrist around. Gets Derek by the hair and drags him across the bed, till Derek’s nuzzling under his chin, then takes another drag.

Then he pushes Derek off him. He taps off his ash and gets up, and walks out of the bedroom.

Derek half-rolls over, as if to follow, and then growls irritably at Chris, who’s come to the bed only because he wants somewhere to sit to take off his shoes. “What, did you miss them?” Derek says.

“No, it went fine, it’s just he wanted to get something to eat after and we ran into Erica Reyes,” Laura says, opening the bathroom door. She’s down to her negligee and the creamy silk inches up her thighs as she leans in the doorway, rubbing off her make-up with a cotton ball.

“She was in the same grade as him,” Chris adds. Once the shoes are off, he toes them under the bed. He glances up when Derek pushes past him, but when he sees the other man’s just looking for his trousers, he goes ahead and flops backwards onto the bed. “Erica wanted to know if Stiles was going to the ice cream social for raising money for the new athletic field, since the lacrosse team is doing so well. Scott played, remember.”

Peter winces, then lets out a long sigh. He’s still flung out on his back, his legs slumped wide apart. “Do we really need a school?” he says.

Chris reaches over and slaps his shoulder, before either Derek can turn around or Laura can throw her cotton ball. Then dodges Peter’s grab at him.

Or he thinks he does, except Peter’s really going for Chris’ suspender. The man hooks it around two fingers, then twists it off the shoulder and down to Chris’ elbow before Chris can unsnap it. Chris starts to take Peter by the wrist, then thinks the better of it and just pulls his arm out of the loop. He lets the elastic pull him up till he’s leaning against Peter, who raises his brows and then grins, dropping the suspender to run his hand up Chris’ belly and then flatten it against Chris’ ribs, teasing at a nipple with his thumb.

“Is it going to keep you from killing Erica?” Chris says.

Peter shrugs. “Well, I’ll be busy, won’t I?”

He nudges off Chris’ other suspender, then slips his hand into the front of Chris’ trousers and pulls Chris over and onto him by the waistband. Chris grunts, settles his arms to either side of Peter’s head and then pushes up his hips, letting the other man open his fly and push down his clothes. Closes his eyes when Peter’s long fingers curl around his cock.

Stiles walks back in when Chris is halfway-seated in Peter. He’s not smoking anymore, though his snicker when he sees them is still a little brittle. He leans against the bedpost for a second, then comes around and wraps his hand in the back of Chris’ shirt. Gives it a tug, and when Chris—fighting down the urge to just snarl—starts to drag out, Stiles gives him a sudden shove that puts him balls-deep in Peter. 

Chris hisses and jams himself up and in, while Peter whines and writhes underneath, pushing the soft part of his throat, between the Adam’s apple and the jaw, up into Chris’ mouth.

“Sorry,” Stiles says to someone. He slips his hand under Chris’ shirt, scratching lightly, and then he pushes it all the way to Chris’ neck, shirt bunching up tight over his arm and across Chris’ shoulderblades. “Did you want this one?”

“Well, we have that movie to go to later,” Laura says dryly. “But I guess I can take Derek. He hasn’t seen this one.”

Derek’s leaning against the wall. He has his trousers pulled on but they’re undone at the top, and he’s just fingering the ends of his belt as he looks on. “Because I’m not a big fan of Lon Chaney,” he says.

Peter keeps clenching around Chris’ cock, rocking them so Chris can never quite get his breath back, can’t even find any kind of rhythm. He just fucks haphazardly into the other man, gasping and jerking, hanging onto the bed by his claws. Drops his head to Peter’s shoulder, then pushes his own shoulders back and out, rubbing frantically into the fingers teasing his nape.

“Neither are Calaveras, you can skip out after the newsreel and just kill that last stubborn son of a bitch,” Stiles says, sighing. His nails scrape hard up Chris’ neck, almost at the hairline, and then he suddenly pulls his arm away.

He gives Chris a hard slap on the left buttock as he steps back from the bed. The sting’s enough to send Chris over, and Peter’s not far behind, but it’s—Chris is twisting his head around even as black dots dance in front of him, trying to see where Stiles is going, and he can feel Peter doing the same.

“Well, have fun,” Stiles says, walking towards the door. “I’m—I’ll be back in the morning. Don’t wait up.”

Derek pushes off the wall, then stops himself. Then he slumps back against the wall. He runs his hand through his hair, lets his arm drop, and gives Laura a look that’s half-angry, half-resigned when she goes over to him.

“Give me ten minutes, I’ll change,” he finally mutters. He pushes off the wall again and starts doing up his trousers.

“Movie’s not for an hour and a half,” she says. She pets his arm, then curls her hand around the back of his neck and pulls him in so they’re cheek to cheek.

Chris puts his head back down, slumping himself. “No,” he says under his breath. “No idea, he didn’t say anything. Doesn’t have any business either, you know that.”

Peter hums in acknowledgement. His head turns so his hair brushes against Chris’ ear, and then Chris hears him running one hand over the sheets, rumpling them up and smoothing them out. He shifts against Chris, just to move his leg so Chris isn’t putting so much weight on it, and then goes slack again.

“He stayed last night,” Peter finally says. “I suppose I’ll tell them to hold his breakfast again when I go get the evening paper.”

“We can get it,” Laura says.

She goes back into the bathroom. Derek goes into the hall, and Chris eventually pulls his cock out of Peter. But he just moves over a couple inches, and then he turns over onto his side. He hears Peter sit up, but a few minutes later the man lies down again, close enough for Chris to feel his body heat but not so close as to touch. Peter huffs once; his heartbeat starts to slow. It’s familiar now and Chris falls asleep listening to it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Derek is referring to Lon Chaney Sr. (not the original Wolf-man, that was Jr.), who had a number of notable horror films during the 1920s. It's a lame in-joke but I couldn't help myself.
> 
> Back in the day, you didn't just see a movie. You saw a newsreel or two, maybe a short film, and then the feature film (which is sort of what the modern experience is heading towards again, what with all the advertising and other stuff they're running before the trailers now).
> 
> Much as my squishy side would like them to all just be happy, I can't realistically see this Stiles getting over what happened to Scott any time soon. Or, for that matter, the others getting over their issues. They're functioning but by no means in a good place yet.


End file.
